The frenzied press attention surrounding a lost dog at John F. Kennedy International Airport is likely to work in the animal’s favor, an animal rescue expert said yesterday.

The 3-year-old whippet, which received a merit award at this week’s Westminster Dog Show, evaded handlers as it was set to board a Los Angeles-bound Delta flight Wednesday, and was last seen running through marshland toward Jamaica Bay.

The long and skinny 40-pound dog, named “Champion Bohem C’est La Vie,” is commonly called Vivi. According to press reports, Vivi is wearing a black wool sweater and a collar that displays the owner’s phone number.

Yesterday, the Port Authority toned down a vigorous search across the airport’s 5,000 acres that included the use of a helicopter. The Port Authority is now instructing its officers to keep an eye out for the animal as part of their regular security patrols.

A spokesman for the Port Authority, Alan Hicks, characterized the previous search as “part of their normal duties to help people at the airport in need.”

He said the Port Authority regularly patrols the airport grounds by helicopter for security reasons and that officers on the patrol were asked to look for the missing dog as part of that duty.

Mr. Hicks said there were “no extra people put on. Those people are there.”

Officers from the Center of Animal Care and Control, a nonprofit under contract to carry out a wide variety of animal-related duties for the city, are patrolling the areas in and around the airport to which they have access.

The director of field operations for the center, Michael Pastore, said finding Vivi “is kind of like finding a needle in a haystack. The airport is such a vast area.”

“It’s a fast breed, and we don’t know what kind of stress this animal has been under, from the show, the noise of the jets,” Mr. Pastore said. “But simultaneously, you couldn’t ask for a better scenario because of all the media attention the animal has gotten. That has got to help.”

Mr. Pastore said that about 10 years ago another dog escaped handlers at JFK and was never returned to its owner.

A co-owner of Vivi, Jil Walton, told The New York Sun in a telephone interview from the Holiday Inn near JFK that she was first alerted of her missing dog as she sat on the airplane, waiting to fly home to California on an 11:55 a.m. flight on Wednesday.

“They couldn’t catch her. They were chasing her around the tarmac and running along the fence line trying to catch her,” Ms. Walton said. “She’s just not thinking at all. She’s a very friendly dog.”

A spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines, Chris Kelly, said the airline is conducting an internal investigation to determine why and how Vivi escaped.

Ms. Kelly said airline employees had initially been involved in the search for most of the day yesterday, but had since handed over the task to “local authorities.”

An officer for Police Precinct 106 in Ozone Park, Queens, the precinct that patrols the area surrounding the airport, said it was not involved in the search.