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Tech

The Simple Wearable Device That Can Help You Keep Tabs on Your Pet

Whistle CEO Ben Jacobs wants to make lost dogs a thing of the past.
Rachel Pick
New York, US
Image: Whistle

It's a brisk fall day in Bushwick Inlet Park, and I'm sitting with Ben Jacobs and Julia Waneka (both humans) and Willow, a Goldendoodle. As Willow gobbles treats, climbs on my lap, and sniffs the piquant odors coming off the East River, a tiny device clipped to her collar is pinpointing her location to within meters. Miles away, her owners can pull up an app and see exactly where their dog is located.

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Jacobs and Waneka both work at Whistle, the San Francisco-based tech company that Jacobs co-founded, and Willow is one of their "spokespups." Whistle makes collar attachments that include GPS trackers, so you can keep tabs on your pet's activity from Whistle's app (available on Android and iOS), and find them if they ever get loose.

In the app, you can designate any area on a map as a safe zone. Once your dog (or cat, because Whistle has been used on outdoor cats, too) leaves its safe zone, you're instantly alerted—via push notification, text, and/or email; whichever method you choose. If Bowser is due to meet his dog walker, you can relax, and even keep an eye on the route they take. "I can basically Hansel-and-Gretel-breadcrumb [my dog]," says Waneka. "Every three minutes you get a new location, and it's literally point-by-point, you can follow their trail."

So far Whistle has already proven to be a godsend for owners of some particularly wily animals. Waneka tells me about a dog who was known to his owners as an "escape artist," and prone to getting into sticky situations. One day he ran after a porcupine while on a hike with his family. "So [the owner] pulled him up on the map, and it showed him next to her," Waneka tells me. The owner was confused, until she heard her dog barking. "He had fallen into a little crevasse, and he was underground." The dog was, in fact, right next to his owner—a few feet below.

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But it's not just owners of the "escape artists" that Whistle thinks they can help. "There's also the owners who just want to have tabs on their pet, for peace of mind," says Jacobs. "So maybe you live in an apartment, and loss isn't your first concern. But you do have a dog walker, or a dog sitter, and there's multiple points of care…this enables you to have ongoing data and perspective to make sure your pet's okay."

Jacobs tells me an estimated 10 million dogs get lost in the US every year. Most find their way home, but "the moments of fear—the hour, two hours, 24 hours, where your family is freaking out over where your dog is—what if we can compress that time?"

A lot of pet owners are under the mistaken impression that microchipping their pet can somehow track their location. In reality, the microchip only holds data that can be read by a shelter with a scanner when your dog or cat is picked up. And Jacobs says he thinks we're "years away" from implantable GPS trackers.

Image: Whistle

The device itself is a little bigger than a square inch, and less than an inch thick. It's lighter than you'd expect, and obviously designed so your pet won't even know it's there. "The hardware should fade into the background," Jacobs says. It does require use of cellular data, so there's a monthly cost ranging from $7-10 a month, depending on the length of the contract you purchase. The tracker itself is $79—but if you constantly worry about your dog or cat getting lost, or they have a penchant for misadventure, the tracker easily pays for itself in prevented emotional damages.

According to the American Pet Products Association, US pet owners will spend an estimated $60.59 billion dollars on their pets this year. But more than a financial investment, our pets are emotional investments—furry familiars we can't imagine living without.

"It's such a beautiful thing to have a pet," says Jacobs. "It's a huge part of my life."