Earlier this week, I came home to find my two kittens gone. I lost my shit. And I found out that it's hard to track pets even in a world of GPS and microchips.
The cats in happier, not-outdoors time.
Before I opened the door to my house, I could tell something was amiss: the 11-month old cat, Squeaky, that I share with my boyfriend, was not in the window. And when we got inside the house and our 6-month grey old kitten, Riff Raff, was not hovering near the door, it was clear. They were gone.
FUCK. FUUUUUCK. My brain divided in half. They are cats, I told myself, cats take care of themselves. Cats come back. No, the other side argued, these are city cats who barely know how to eat, let alone hunt. And Riff Raff is still little! He'll run right into traffic. As if on cue, someone's brakes squealed, a siren started blaring and a car alarm sounded: we live on a busy street. My legs went wobbly. The animals weren't wearing collars.
And our options seemed pretty pitiful. It was nighttime and our neighbor, the one who had accidentally left the back door open while moving a desk out of the basement, said it had been nine hours since she had been in the house. Nine hours! What could we do? Call out their names? Make posters? Ring doorbells? Try Animal Care and Control? My iPhone can be tracked across the country. Surely, there must be something better than fliers for our cats.
Riff Raff, not exactly a survivor.
The first stop on my computer pet search were microchip sites. Both cats were microchipped, so if they got brought into ASPCA or Animal Care and Control, they'd be identified. I called in and told a nice woman that the cats should be marked as "lost." She made some clucking noises, gave a few basic tips (put a litter sample outside, make flyers) and wished me luck.
It turns out that beyond that there are a range of different tech options, although many are expensive, limited in effectiveness, and designed for larger animals than my two babies.
Apps. Programs do exist: for $5, I could register my cats with LostPetTracker; it'd send my alert out to everyone else with the app, and then whenever someone found or lost a pet in my area, I would get an email. This seemed ... pointless. If someone happened to spot my cats and took a picture and uploaded it to the service, it would be geolocated and time-stamped, but the odds of that happening seem slim. Other apps, like PetRescuers, similarly depend on good Samaritans to download an app and make reports of loose animals. iPet Alert notifies vets as well as app users to be on the lookout, but, again, that requires opt-in. These apps are virtual pet flyers (those goddamn pet fliers!), but seem like they'd be less effective than just posting a notice on Craigslist or another local site.
Collars/trackers. When the animal shelter told me that my cats would be microchipped, I thought that that meant they could be geolocated if they were lost. Sadly, this is not the case: GPS units need power and no one has figured out a way to add tiny batteries to the inside of a cat. It is possible, though, to put that equipment on an animal's collar . Tagg, a leader in the field, works much like an iPhone finder: put a dongle on the animal's collar and Tagg uses cell phone networks to track it. You can establish a perimeter and get texts and emails if the pet breaks out. And the animal's location can be tracked from your phone or computer.
I spoke to Tagg's senior director of sales and marketing, Dudley Fetzer, about the technology. Tagg was launched about a year ago and it's owned by Qualcomm, the maker of the geolocation chips inside almost every cell phone. The company had been looking for ways to create tracking products (think of package tracking) and a team of pet-lovers within the company gravitated towards this effort. Unfortunately, for beasts like Riff Raff and Squeaky who weigh less than ten pounds, Tagg isn't recommended due to the size of the antennas that need to be attached to tracker. (This is not an insurmountable problem, though, as Fetzer said they've heard from numerous cat owners whose cats don't mind the device.) Fetzer couldn't comment on the number of units sold but said the product has been a great success. "We save several pets on a daily basis," he noted. And just next week, Tagg will be rolling out a new service that tracks pets' movements and awards points for exercise. It's like a juiced up pedometer, a Fitbit: meet the quantified pet.
But the costs are not insignificant. The Tagg tracker costs $99 with a monthly service charge around $8. Other GPS locators run even more: SportDog Tek training and locator collars and handsets cost up to $550. And these devices are mostly designed for dogs: none of the GPS-enabled collars that I saw would fit cats at all.
