Tagg Pet Tracker

I had the opportunity to test-drive the Tagg Pet Tracker from Verizon Wireless for two months for our dog Sadie. This handy little device attaches to your dog’s collar, and keeps track of where your dog is, and how active she is.

Here’s the tracker clipped on Sadie’s collar. It’s nice and small, and she never bothered it once. (Don’t mind her fur. It’s summer, she’s a Husky cross, and she just started shedding… she won’t be pretty for another 3 weeks…)

Here she is again, looking slightly more respectable. Slightly.

The main goal of the Tagg Pet Tracker is so you know when your dog leaves your property, where she goes when she leaves, and how to find her once she is gone. The Tagg will send you an email and a text message when the dog is outside the Home Tagg Zone (that you set).

Sadie doesn’t actually leave very often, and when she does she just goes to the bottom of the driveway (which I set outside our Home Tagg Zone). So to really see how the tracker works, I took it off her collar and went for a drive.

You can use your computer or the free Tagg app on your mobile device to locate your dog’s current location on a map, or to track your dog’s progress. With the track feature, you will get email and/or text notices (depending on your settings) every 3 minutes with updated location information.

Here’s another location, a few minutes later. The email and text messages will give you an address close to her location.

And a map is included in the email. The blue box is where Sadie (or at least, her tracker) was.

(Love, Sadie. Because she didn’t really mean to run away, and she’ll be so happy to see you again when you find her!)

From the website, you can see the map with Sadie’s location (the orange paw print).

And you can see the trail she took to get to her current location. The orange dots are sort of “check in points” – I got an email to correspond to each of these locations.

Then, when she comes home on her own, or you find her (or bring the tracker back home), you’ll get another email/text saying “I’m back!” Phew! No more worrying!

One other feature I was really excited about was the activity tracking. Sadie’s an old, arthritic Husky cross farm dog. As she gets older, she spends a lot more time sleeping on our porches, so I really didn’t expect that she was getting all that much activity. Boy, was I wrong!

Here is one of her more active days… She racked up 239 Tagg Points (compared to a monthly average of 169).

I love the timeline feature. Who know that between 1:00-3:00am every day Sadie gets up and takes a tour of the farm? I wonder why? (But not enough to get up and spy on her.)

And her total time active really surprised me! This was a busy day for her, clocking in over 3 hours of activity. Most days she gets more like 1.5-2 hours of activity. As the weather has gotten hotter, she has been less active (and who could blame her?). But still, for an old arthritic farm dog, that’s pretty good!

Veterinarians recommend at least 30-60 minutes of activity for dogs daily. This is a great way to see if you dog is hitting that goal! You can also set Tagg Point goals to hit each day. These point totals are easy to see on the Tagg mobile app, so it’s easy to keep track of how your dog (and you!) are doing during the day.

Here’s Sadie’s last 30 days of activity…

And a snapshot of the two months that we had the tracker. Some of the dips are from when the battery needed to be charged and was on the docking station instead of her collar, and some of the dips are on the hotter days when she just hung out in the shade. But, overall, a pretty good activity level for our old girl!

I used this on our dog, but it could also be used for any other animal. This would be a great tool for cattle. They tend to stay in herds, so not every cow would need a tracker, but a tracker or two on the troublemaker cows would alert you if they broke through a fence and were off wandering around. The Tagg Pet Tracker would also be great for a sick animal – we could monitor the activity levels of animals we were worried about to be sure they were moving around to get food, water, and a little exercise even if they aren’t feeling great.

What systems do you have in place to find your dog if she goes missing? Collars, tags, and microchips are very important, but none of those can tell you where your runaway pet is right now!

{Thanks to Verizon Wireless for letting me use the Tagg Pet Tracker for two months. All thoughts, opinions, and photographs are my own.}