We're barking mad for these smart ways to care for our critters
We love our pets, and while most of us balk at forking over fistfuls of cash for our own health and safety, when it comes to our furry, four-legged friends we quite often go overboard. Because they’re worth it.
We’re not going to sugar coat it; pet tech is pricey – it’s going to cost you a bit to connect your pet, but there are loads of benefits, including convenience, safety, and health.
You can put the smart home to work to help you care for your pet and lend a hand with things like making sure Fido is fed on time, knowing when your puppy has escaped, keeping tabs on your cat’s activity level, and making sure everyone’s entertained when you’re away.
Of course, some of the tech you may already have can double as pet tech. One of the top uses for smart home cameras is checking in on your dog from work – just to say “Hi,” or to make sure he’s not chewing the couch. Use your smart door lock to let your pet-sitter in and pop a contact sensor on the back gate so you know if someone’s left it open giving Fido a chance to scarper.
Here we round up some of the best pet tech we’ve tried and tested, so you can continue to spoil your precious bundles of fur, even when you can’t be with them.
Best dog tracker
Whistle GO
Buy Now: Amazon | whistle.com | $129.99
A GPS pet tracker is the smartphone age’s answer to microchipping your dog (which you should still do, of course). Where a microchip is a great tool for when your pet gets lost and then found, a GPS tracker is a much more immediate solution. It works by keeping tabs on your pet’s location, then, if and when it crosses a pre-determined boundary, sends an alert to your smartphone.
Whistle is the leader in this space, making a compact device with good battery life, that also doubles as a pet activity and behavioral tracker – like a FitBit for pets. We have been testing the new, improved Whistle GO Explore for a year now and are very impressed.
Whistle GO: Design and features
Whistle now has three models, the new Whistle Switch, Whistle GO Explore, and Whistle Fit. We tested the GO, which despite being the mid-range model has the most features.
A small, chunky brick you attach to your pet’s collar, the GO comes in pink, grey, or green and it charges using a standard USB cable.
As well as monitoring your pet’s location and activity, the GO has a health feature that tracks drinking, itching, sleeping, and licking. The GO is waterproof (IPX8) and its battery should last up to 20 days on a single charge. It also features a built-in nightlight you can activate when you’re on a nighttime walk or to help with tracking.
While it’s marketed as an activity tracker, unless you are seriously concerned about your pet’s lack of excursive the main reason to get one of these is as a safety net should your dog or cat (yes you can put this on a cat’s collar too – any animal over 8lb) escape or gets lost.
In the Whistle app you set up safe places and if the tracker crosses the border of one of those places the GPS kicks in. When this happens you get an alert on your phone like this one we got in testing: “Heads up, Gus is 0.3 miles from home near Clearview Drive.”
Whistle GO in use
We’ve been using the Whistle GO with our four-year-old 70lb Wirehaired Pointing Griffon who is an expert escape artist, and it came in very handy more than once for tracking him down (even outside of our testing!).
The alert came through about 2-3 minutes after the dog crossed the boundary – which is a long time, but more of a heads up than we would have received otherwise. Once he crossed the boundary a big “track” button appears on your phone and this kicks in the GPS, so you can more accurately track and locate him.
While he’s in the Wi-Fi boundary the GPS turns off and a less-accurate Wi-Fi location is used to save battery life. Consequently, the battery life on the GO is impressive.
When we tested the third-generation Whistle (since discontinued) we would have to recharge it every four or five days; the GO went 26 days before we needed to charge it. However, the more you take your pet outside the “safe place,” say for a walk, the more often you’ll need to charge.
Also, as we’ve used the Go the battery life has gone down, and now we are charging on average every 8 to 10 days.
On the activity tracking side, the app shows you a timeline of your pet’s activity, how much ground he covered, and an estimate of how many calories burned, plus how long he was active.
You can set daily goals and be alerted when he hits them, although it would be nice to get an alert around 5pm saying if he needs some more exercise (you can hook Whistle up to IFTTT to get features like this).
When you, or someone with the Whistle app on their phone, take the dog for a walk you get an alert saying “Enjoy your walk” and then another one when he’s back home – a nice way to keep track of any dog walkers and make sure they’re doing their due diligence. You don’t get a detailed map of your walk, however, more of a point-to-point overview.
Whistle GO also has built-in health-tracking – which uses the accelerometer in the device to monitor drinking, licking, scratching, and sleeping.
You can see Health Insights in the app and get a weekly report emailed to you that includes how long your dog spent doing each activity and helpfully an indication of whether it’s below average, average or above average.
As someone who has frequently sat in front of my vet saying my dog has been scratching but not being able to answer her questions about how often and how long, this is actually useful information. Plus, the long-term tracking compares the activities week-by-week, so you can keep an eye out for potential problems.
The biggest downside to Whistle is the $13 a month subscription for cellular data that enables the GPS tracking, and if you have two dogs that’s per Whistle.
You can’t use the device without the cellular plan. You can save money if you commit to one or two years and pay upfront (getting you down to around $8 a month).
This is expensive considering how little you’ll actually use the data plan, but it’s essentially an insurance policy, and all the features you get with the Whistle app are fun and informative, and worth paying something for.
In our testing, however, GPS tracking was pretty spotty. It would say Gus was home from his walk about 800 feet down the street or tell me he was out of the boundary when actually he was just at the far end of the yard. We have very poor cellular service in our neighborhood though, so considering that it actually did a decent job.
One downside here is if you like to go walking in the woods, or camp in remote areas with your dog, you won’t be able to rely on this to keep track of your pup because those places rarely have decent cellular service either.
Best cat tracker
Jiobit Next
Buy Now: jiobit.com | $150
While we love the Whistle, it’s a bit too bulky for your average feline friend or small canine companion. Enter Jiobit Next. Originally designed (and still primarily used) as a child location tracker, the Jiobit is a teeny tiny device that’s easy to use and in our testing very reliable.
Using its patented “progressive beaconing technology,” the Jiobit tracks your furry friend with a combination of GPS, cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. All these different methods do a good job of keeping a digital eye on your pet.
Jiobit Next: Design and features
With a teardrop design, this small plastic tracker weighs less than a single AA battery. While still a bit bulky for really small cats, it’s definitely the best option available today if you want something that’s as unobtrusive as possible.
Its diminutive size is aided by a selection of different attachment accessories that make it easy to clip on to a collar, and remove, without adding too much bulk.
The water-resistant (IPX8) device features real-time tracking, geofencing, and the ability to add trusted places to the Jiobit app. It can also pair with different phones so you can see when your pet is on a walk with someone else – or when they’re visiting with the neighbor.
As with all cellular-based trackers, you have to pay a monthly subscription, and Jiobit’s is a hefty $14.99 for a month-to-month plan. If you’re willing to sign up for 6 months or two years you can save some cash ($12.99 or $8.99 monthly respectively).
Unlike with Whistle, there are no health features here, but you do get a nice 7-day timeline of where your cat has been prowling, or what routes you took your pup on a walk.
A Jiobit Plus plan adds a 30-day timeline, as well as text and email notifications in addition to the included push notifications, for an extra $3 a month.
Jiobit Next: In use
Setting up the Jiobit is really easy, just charge it up using the included charging cradle (it is a proprietary charger, unfortunately), scan the code on the back of the tracker and follow the steps in the app to get it hooked into your Wi-Fi.
Next, you add details about the pet you’ll be putting it on, including a picture and then you can add any caregivers – anyone else who might be with your pet. This is worth doing as the tracker can connect to multiple phones and use their Bluetooth connection as an added tracking point.
You can set up multiple “trusted places” – where you won’t get notifications when they are inside the boundary. We added a few of our neighbors’ yards and the place we take our cat to board when we’re on vacation.
We specifically didn’t set up our immediate neighbor’s yard – as they don’t like it when our kitten Smokey starts eyeing the birds at their multiple bird feeders.
So now, when he crosses the fence between our gardens and leaves the trusted place, we get an alert so I can pop out and grab him.
In our testing, we found Jiobit to be the fastest and most accurate tracking device we tested, sending an alert instantly when Smokey left our yard and showing us in real-time where he was – despite us having pretty poor cellular service in our neck of the woods.
We also really liked the option to ring the Jiobit from the app, which helped us find the sneaky kitten a few times when he was hiding around the house.
Jiobit says the rechargeable device will last up to 2 weeks on a single charge under optimal conditions. In a perfect world, this means there’s no need to charge daily.
We’ve been testing the Jiobit for three days though and we’re already down to 70%, so we’re not sure we’ll make it to 14 days before needing to recharge.
Best smart pet feeder
PetSafe Smart Feeder
Buy now: Amazon | petsafe.net | $194.99,
Life gets busy and sometimes you can’t get home to feed Felix or Fido, or you have so many other mouths to feed that perhaps he or she gets overlooked and it’s not till you finally plop down on the couch and spot that woeful face do you remember.
An automatic pet feeder may seem like an unnecessary luxury but it’s actually a really great tool for pet care. Your pet gets fed on time, every time, and gets the exact portion – which is crucial to pet health.
From a smart home perspective, the PetSafe we tested also lets you feed your pet with your voice using Alexa, which is super handy. Plus, you can feed them remotely, great if you’re out of the house and want to make sure they’re taken care of.
PetSafe Smart Feeder: Design and features
PetSafe is a big device, it’s not going to easily blend in where your small food bowl used to be – but that’s because it’s doing double duty as a food storage system as well as food bowl.
The stainless-steel bowl can be removed for cleaning, and there’s a button on the top that will dispense food if you don’t want to use the app – although this is quite slow.
Features include being able to schedule, monitor, and adjust your pet’s feeding remotely. The PetSafe automatically dispenses correct portions and sends you alerts when food is running low.
You can also hook into the Amazon Dash Replenishment service to make sure you never run out of food.
The PetSafe works off AC power, which means no food if the power goes out so you’ll want to pop in some batteries for backup.
PetSafe Smart Feeder in use
Controlling the feeder with the app is simple, the main screen has a big button you press to feed on the fly, prompting you to choose how much.
There is also access to scheduling options, and the choice to feed your dog slowly rather than all at once, which is good for those ravenous hounds that wolf it all down – can’t be good for the digestion!
A timeline view shows you all the feeds your pet has received and when you first set up the device it asks if you have a dog or cat and provides a feeding schedule you can tweak.
Notifications in the app include options to have alerts sent when your pet is fed, when there’s an error, and when you are low on food or out of food.
These last two are a new addition in the latest model; the earlier version didn’t have this and it was easy to think your pet had been fed when in fact nothing had come out.
You can also now tie the feeder into Amazon’s Dash Replenishment service, but we couldn’t test this as they don’t carry the food we use.
You can fit about 24 cups of dry or semi-moist food in the feeder – no wet food as that would just be messy.
You’re able to feed up to four cups per meal, which is plenty. We really like the slow feed option, which doles out bits of the total portion over 15 minutes – it was great for our mad-hungry dog and kept him very attentive!
The feeder only works on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, but it connected to our dual band router no problem. The biggest problem here is if you have two pets that don’t like to share.
You can control two feeders from one app – but that’s a big outlay. In our scenario we have one dog crated and the other not, so we just scheduled the smaller dog’s feed for when the bigger dog would be in his kennel.
There are some pet feeders out there that use wireless tags you attach to your pet’s collar to only open for the correct pet, but we’ve not tested those yet. They are also quite a bit more expensive.
Our only problem with the PetSafe was the flimsiness of the bowl attachment, as our bigger dog could easily rip it out in his quest for more food – he didn’t do any damage to it, but it did mean the food would just spill on the floor because he’d knocked the bowl out of the way.
We’d love a way for it to be more securely attached. Thankfully he wasn’t able to get into the food dispenser itself, despite trying very hard. So that’s a bonus.
Best smart water bowl
Sure Petcare Felaqua Connect
Buy now: Amazon, SurePetcare | £90
While dogs drink out of toilet bowls, our kitties are a bit more discerning about their water sources. And apparently, they’re not only fussy but not drinking enough is a major issue for their delicate digestive systems.
Sure Petcare’s newest gadget the Felaqua Connect is designed to give them a constant source of clean water and keep an eye on how much of it they’re drinking for you.
Sure Petcare Felaqua: Design and features
More than just a well-designed watering bowl that delivers fresh water without messy filters, the Felauqa also monitors how much, how often, and when your cat drinks each day.
The battery-powered device reports all the info to the Sure Petcare smartphone app, and when combined with other Sure Petcare products – including the Microchip Pet Feeder Connect and Microchip Pet Door Connect – can help provide a pretty complete picture of your cat’s habits, helping you keep an eye on his health.
The genius thing about the whole Sure Petcare line is that it uses your cat’s existing microchip – the one you probably got put in at your first vet visit – to identify your cat.
This means no need to put a bulky gadget on their collar to ID them, and no matter how many pets you have, just pair them to the system and you’ll get personalized results on their aqua intake.
Sure Petcare Felaqua: In use
All the Sure Petcare gadgets require a hub to work properly. You can buy the hub and the Felaqua in a bundle for £148. It hooks into your router and needs to be plugged in.
The hub looks like the top half of a cat head, with flashing kitty ears that glow red if there’s a connection problem. Once it’s up and running, you use the app to pair your water bowl and your cat. Just have them come near it and the hub and the system scans them. Very cool.
Once set up, just leave the Felaqua out for your kitty to sip from when they fancy (keep it relatively close to the hub, we found if we moved it upstairs, for example, it would lose connection).
Now sit back and relax and watch all the data come into your app. Here you can see how much your cat drank at each sitting, when they drank, and how long they drank for. You can also get a push notification for each event. Yes, they meow.
You can also get an alert if water was “removed” from the bowl – i.e. something other than your microchip-connected feline took water out. Plus, you get periodic reminders to change the water to keep it fresh and also when it’s running low.
The whole design of this device is really quite ingenious. It looks a little space-agey but considering it’s holding a lot of water it doesn’t take up a lot of space.
It’s super easy to refill without getting water everywhere. Just lift up the water bottle that sits on top of the bowl, turn it over, unscrew the lid, refill and put it back.
It has a nipple system that releases the water only when it’s snugly positioned over the shallow bowl, and only enough each time to fill it, so your kitty gets fresh water with every drink.
If you have a cat with any health issues this is an invaluable tool, as water intake is so key for kitties. For healthy cats it may be a bit overkill, but it does make it easy to ensure your feline friend is getting fresh water every day.
Best pet cameras
Being able to check on your pet while they’re home alone is something everyone can benefit from. There are quite a few specialized pet cams on the market as well as some regular smart home viewers with some decent pet features.
When buying a pet camera, you’ll want to consider similar factors as you would for a regular smart home camera. Video quality, resolution, and frames per second (fps) are all critical here. You really should be looking at 1080p quality at 30 frames per second – that’s the optimal experience, and anything less is a compromise.
As we’ve mentioned, standard smart home cameras are an option here too. Devices like the Wyze Cam, Ring Stick-Up cam, Arlo cameras (which can specifically identify animals), can offer you the ability to check on your pets and communicate with them. Plus, they can fill the role of being a standard smart home camera. You’re getting something that gives you both options.
Pet-specific cameras have interactive features built just for your furry friends, such as the ability to dole out treats, or play games with them – either autonomously or with you driving the controls from your office.
Most of these gadgets are designed for both dogs and cats, and several have added features that come with a subscription.
Petcube Bites 2
$249.99, Amazon | petcube.com
Petcube Bites 2 is a camera and treat dispenser in one, with Alexa built-in. In addition to being able to see, talk to, and send your pet a treat using a mobile app, the Petcube Bites Alexa skill lets you do all this just with your voice.
Plus, you can use Alexa for all the other fun and useful things the voice assistant is great for.
Petcube Bites: Design and features
The Petcube is a tall, slim device with a brushed metal body that ideally should be mounted to a wall, but can also be placed on a table or low counter (if you put it too high you won’t be able to see your pet on the floor).
Features include a 160-degree camera view that you can stream from live, in full HD, two-way audio that lets you chat with your moggy or pooch from afar, and a fun, interactive Angry Birds-esque treat flinging tool.
As a smart camera, you can schedule the device to turn on or off at certain times, or just be active when you open the app.
Motion and sound alerts are free but you’ll need to sign up for the company’s Petcube Care plan for smart alerts (pet, human, bark, and meow detection), longer video history (you get four hours for free), and the ability to download your videos. It starts at $3.99 a month.
Setup is straightforward: plug it in, load it up with treats, download the Petcube app and connect to your Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz or 5GHz).
As we’ve mentioned, Petcube Bites ideally needs to be wall-mounted, or you end up struggling to see over surfaces if you just prop it up. You can balance it on the edge of a table or unit fine – but unless it’s at the edge you’ll get an obscured view.
Petcube Bites in use
We tested Petcube Bites with two dogs, a small terrier and a larger dog, and they both loved it – obviously. They quickly came to recognize the sound the camera makes when you open the app and connect to it, which means they run to the camera as soon as you turn it on.
This is classic click-and-treat conditioning and adding the sound is a clever idea to make them come to you as soon as you want to check-in (you can turn off the sound if you prefer).
The app’s interface for flinging the treat is well-thought-out and fun. It works in landscape mode only and the interface is super-imposed over the live view of your home.
Click a small dog bone and then swipe up to fling the treat, choosing from three distances. You can also choose to video the interaction or take a photo. Plus, there’s a microphone button to toggle on two-way talk if you want to hear your pup or have them hear you.
What else works with Alexa? The 35 best Amazon Alexa compatible devices you can buy
You can schedule treats to be doled out to your pet during the day, too, if you don’t have time to interact, or you could share the camera with friends and family so they can check-in and play.
You can also make your camera public and let strangers on the internet treat your pet, but this is not something we would recommend and the social feed in the app showing all the shared cameras is not something we were fans of (one reviewer mentioned seeing a naked man walking past one camera – err, no thanks).
While you can’t turn the feed off, you can change the settings so that you don’t see it every time you launch the app.
As a pet monitoring device, Petcube works well, sending you an alert when motion or sound is detected, which takes you straight to a live stream from your camera. The alert is a purring sound, which is cute, but very quiet.
With the subscription, you can get alerts for specific pet activity, a bark or meow, and/or a person, and you can then also filter your video clips by these.
Video quality is decent, not crisp, but clear enough so you can see what is going on and talk to your pet, but night vision is very grainy and often took a while to kick in, leaving us staring at a black screen for a bit.
We had our test unit set up a few feet away from our dog’s kennel, where he goes when we’re out of the house (he’s a 60lb puppy and I like my leather couch).
We were able to fling the treats far enough that they landed in his kennel (and if they didn’t make it our 11-year-old Border Terrier was happy to come to clean up the mess.
There is a bit of a mess with the treat flinging, as the debris comes out with it, so you won’t want to put it near your best rug. You also need to be picky about what treats you put in here, or it can get really messy and won’t work properly.
Petcube says they should be round, no smaller than .3 inches and no bigger than 1 inch, which limits you a bit. They have a list of “recommended” treats on the Petcube website.
The built-in Alexa is great if you don’t already have the smart speaker in the room this will go in, and makes the price point a little more palatable.
However, if you have an Alexa in the same room, you’ll want to turn the voice assistant in this off. As with a lot of third-party Alexa devices, it is lacking a few features, such as music grouping and ESP, where only the closest Alexa will pipe up – making it more annoying than useful.
We (more specifically our kids) did love using the Petcube skill to send treats with our voice, however.
Ring Spotlight Cam
Buy now: Amazon, ring.com | £179,
As we noted in our review of the Nest Cam, having an outdoor camera may be necessary if you want to keep an eye on your pet and he or she spends a lot of time in your backyard.
The Ring Spotlight Cam is a very good solution here as it’s battery-powered so you can put it in the best spot in your yard to catch your pet’s antics.
More on cameras: Best outdoor security cameras
What we love about it as an animal cam is it has a built-in spotlight that turns on at night when it detects motion. We’re not species-est here at The Ambient, and clearly this feature would be useful for keeping an eye on any number of critters.
We actually use one in our backyard to keep watch over our chicken coop – if a predator prowls around at night the bright spotlight acts as a good deterrent.
Ring Spotlight Cam: Pet-friendly features
Ring Spotlight Cam comes in white or black, and features two slots for batteries so you don’t have to recharge too often, or opt for the solar panel add-on and hopefully never have to worry about keeping it juiced up.
Two LED panels on either side of the camera light up when motion is detected, and you can set motion zones and adjust the sensitivity. For pet-watching, you’re going to want to enable all motion zones.
The app will ping you when there’s motion and you can watch a live feed and use two-way talk to chat to your pet. The 140-degree field of view is decent and 1080p HD video gets you a pretty clear picture, but not a lot of detail and the zoom is a bit of a blurry mess.
Night vision is also good enough. What you’re really paying for here is the portability – being able to put this anywhere makes it a great pet cam, although you’ll need decent Wi-Fi wherever it sits.
Ring Spotlight Cam: As a pet camera
We set the Ring Spotlight up on an oak tree near our chicken coop, so we could keep an eye on the birds and be alerted to any suspicious movement at night that might signal a raccoon or fox sniffing around.
Using our 25lb and 60lb dogs as testers the floodlights activated reliably on motion, lighting up the chicken coop to potentially scare off the predators.
Video quality is a bit of a letdown, as even though the camera is only about 20 feet away from the coop we can’t really see into it very well, just enough blurry shapes to know that the chicks are still alive and well.
For a pet cam that lets you see your pet outdoors, know when he or she is running around, talk to them and check in on them if they’re outdoors at night, Ring Spotlight is a good option. It also doubles as a decent security camera, with a loud siren you can activate from the app. Read our full review of it here.
Other pet cameras to consider
While we haven’t tested these devices, they get good user reviews and have features our picks don’t that might be a good fit for you.
Furbo Dog Camera
The Furbo Dog Camera has a 1080p camera with an impressive 160-degree field of view, although there’s only one forward-facing lens, so you’ll want to place it against a wall. There’s room in the bank for 100 treats, which it will fire out one at a time. We haven’t tested the Furbo yet to ascertain video quality or treat velocity.
There’s night vision so you can still keep tabs on your pets after dark, and two-way audio as well. Furbo also listens for barking and will alert you to any distress while you’re away via a push notification, which is a neat feature.
There’s also the Furbo Dog Nanny service, available in the US and Canada only, which uses AI to give you even more features. These include dog activity alerts and dog selfie alerts, which basically let you know that the dog is looking at the camera and might want a treat. There’s also person alerts, so if you do have a dog sitter that comes over to walk your best bud you’ll know.
Finally, Dog Nanny has a Doggie Diary, which gives you the most adorable moments from your dog’s day in 60 seconds. You get a free 90-day trial when you buy a Furbo, or pay $$.99 for three months then $6.99 a month or $69 for an annual subscription.
Pawbo Life Pet Camera
Pawbo has a massive range of pet cameras under its Theme Park brand, which goes some way to explaining the mad array of cameras, interactive toys and treat dispensers.
The main Pawbo Life is a neat and compact unit, although it lags behind rivals in terms of video quality. The camera opts for 720p HD rather than 1080p. However, the Pawbo makes up for its technical deficiencies with a host of games and entertainment options.
The standard Pawbo has two-way communication and a laser chasing game, which you can play manually or set to run automatically, making it useful while you’re at home as well.
The Pawbo Munch is a more fully-fledged feeder that you can pair with the Pawbo Life. You can reward your pet via the food drawer, which could hold a bigger meal if you’re running late, or want to make sure your cat is fed while you’re away. The treat drawer has two elements: the tray itself and an interior dispenser, which means treats can be doled out slowly over time as your pet plays with the Munch.
Petzi Treat Cam
Managing to sneak in as the cheapest camera on our list is the Petzi Treat Cam. And, as the name suggests, it’s fairly straightforward in what you can expect here.
Owners can check on their pets throughout the day using their phone or tablet and using the built-in speaker they can shout at them to stop eating food off the counter. Just be aware that there’s no microphone, so while they can hear you, you can’t hear them.
So there’s some small sacrifices you’ll have to put up with for the lower price, but you do get a strong viewing range and a night-vision option for low-light. If you want to reward your pet, the remote treat option also lets you unleash snack bites day or night.
