In Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze,” the missing animal is a racehorse.
Silver Blaze is the celebrated horse owned by Colonel Ross and the favorite for the Wessex Cup. The horse disappears from its stable shortly before the race, while its trainer John Straker is found dead on the nearby moor. Sherlock Holmes is asked to investigate both the theft and the murder.
The story is especially famous for Holmes’s observation that the stable dog did not bark during the night. He treats the silence as meaningful evidence, reasoning that the intruder was someone the dog knew. This is the source of the well-known “curious incident” exchange between Holmes and Inspector Gregory.
“Silver Blaze” first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1892. It is one of the most frequently anthologized Holmes stories and helped cement the detective’s reputation for extracting clues from absences as well as visible evidence.