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By Greg Bartlett

Our family has three Shetland Sheepdogs, and every year or so we have a litter which we sell once the puppies are old enough. Besides the financial benefit our dogs provide, they’re our friends, too. We would hate for anything to happen to them, whether injury, sickness, getting lost, or being stolen. Of course we can take precautions to help them avoid injury or illness, but can we really control whether or not one of our dogs wanders off or is stolen?

Dogs & GPS Tracking

Actually, it’s pretty easy to do so. If we use GPS devices in our dogs’ collars, we’ll be able to determine exactly where our dogs are at any point in time. For instance, for a few months our male dog kept wandering to a nearby neighborhood and eating at a friendly neighbor’s house. A GPS device would have told us exactly where he was every time we wondered when he didn’t show up at our house.

GPS devices could also alert us if our dogs leave preset boundaries. We live out in the country and don’t have a fenced-in yard where we keep our dogs, so a GPS device could be especially helpful to let us know whenever one of our dogs left our property. If our dogs left the boundaries we set up, we’d be notified by phone call, text message, or email, and could then use the information provided by the GPS devices to find out where our dogs were and continue to track their location until we recovered them.

A GPS device could also let us know if our dogs start moving over particular speeds. Our dogs like chasing our horse, so they may go fairly fast for short periods of time, but if the GPS tracking device tells us that the dogs are moving at forty-five miles an hour and continue to do so, we’d have a pretty good indication that the dogs were stolen. The GPS device, though, would continue to lead us and the police to the dogs until we were able to recover them.

For most people, their pet is like another family member. We don’t want our dogs to be injured, lost, or stolen, and while we do what we can to ensure their health, one of the best ways to ensure their safety is to use GPS devices attached to their collars. It’s just one more way to protect our furry family members.