Sam met Taz at work and it was love at first site. Since work romances can get awkward Sam decided to adopt Taz. Taz was so named because of the collar he was wearing when he was found wandering the streets. We are currently fostering him and let’s just say that the first week was not easy.
Taz was here for exactly one day before he wiggled out of his collar while on a walk. He did this because the mailbox door fell down close to him and it scared him. After a 3 hour search and rescue romp through the woods and across roads he finally decided to allow himself to be “captured”. A harness was added to his ensemble along with the collar, Sam took him out for a walk in the fog, at night and this time it was the garage door that freaked him out and he managed to pull out of the harness. Thankfully after only 1 and half hour search in a thick fog, late at night, in the woods he came back on his own. With an injured leg that required a vet visit to treat the infection.
What do you do? Well you look for escape proof harnesses and you give them flashing lights and reflective tape and you vow to never walk “that dog” again unless he has one leash on his collar and one on the harness! Plus you remember that on Mountain Men, the TV show, the guy who chases mountain lions uses a radio collar that works in the middle of nowhere for miles. Let the research begin. We knew we did not need a collar that allowed us to give him a shock because, husky, also his personality is such that negative doesn’t work. As we learned in that first week anything bad or surprising will send him into panic mode and his instinct says run. I could just see using that shock to stop a behavior only to have him freak out and run away. Not the behavior we want. While some people said that the apple locating devices or their android counterparts worked great. Even Apple says don’t just don’t. They only work if they are near other Apple devices which definitely would not work out here where we live but it’s just not the right tool for the job no matter where you live.
Now the radio tracking collars are expensive and they are also big and you only have one device that shows you were the dog is. What we wanted was something that could do the following:
- Multiple devices could be used to track the dogs location.
- The device be light weight and thin enough to stay on the dog at all times except when charging.
- Long battery life.
- Noise, like a click, that could be used to help the dog be trained to return not just if they hear you calling but if they hear the noise on their collar activate.
- Long distance tracking.
- Able to get signal even in the woods, during weather, and when it is windy. Up here we could not get satellite TV because of the trees and the wind. We also have places around us where there are dead spots, no cellular signal.
- Have the cost be reasonable.
- Have the updates of location be close to real time to make locating him quicker and more accurate.
- Water proof.
With that list in mind we started sorting options based on if they meet the criteria and then how many items did they match. I was surprised by the number of trackers available and the range of costs be it monthly or one time purchase price or a combo of those. After reading reviews and watching youtube videos about products and reviews of products we narrowed it down to two choices.
The first was the Tractive DOG XL
This collar has a phone app, this particular one is supposed to have longer battery life because the original just would not have worked. Most advertise a certain amount of battery life but lost dog mode uses that battery faster. I thought this one had the noise for training but I don’t see that on their website for this collar. Distance, signal, real time updating and weight/size were all okay for us. You have a one time up front purchase price and then the monthly plan for the service. It is also supposed to be water proof which is important here. You attach the tracker to your dogs collar using magnetic clips. The tracker can be purchased via Amazon or direct from the company or other retailers.
The other choice was the Fi dog tracker
The Fi has everything on the list except for the noise to help in training. This tracker is smaller and it comes with it’s own collar. The tracking collar stays on Taz unless it is in the charger at night while he is sleeping. The reason that was important is I envisioned him slipping out a door unexpectedly or going through a screen or jumping out of a stopped car, or even that quick walk that ends up off leash. It runs on the wi fi and distance from the base has not been an issue for us. It was easy to setup a safe zone small enough to give us time to act if he did unexpectedly get loose. That safe zone was something that reviewees said was more difficult with the Tractive. If you live in a neighborhood a lot of times people said that it was difficult to get the safe zone down to just your yard. By the time you were notified that your dog was loose they might be two streets down. The things that really tipped the scales to the Fi side was that you get 3 months trial, one month free plus 20% off, no cost for the collar or the device just pay the monthly subscription, free hardware upgrades and free software upgrades. Oh and the collar has a light option that you can turn on. If your dog is fluffy you might not be able to see it. But here if we were able to get even the barest of glimpses of a light in the woods it would be extremely helpful in locating him.
How has it worked so far? Well it’s been a couple of weeks since we got it and started using it and we like it. Thankfully no hardcore test of an actual lost dog but we have been testing it by setting it to lost dog and seeing how quickly we were notified and how accurate the gps tracking is. It’s not always spot on, for instance if we are at the end of our driveway it shows that he is in the little neighborhood up the road from us or even at a specific address of a house in that little area. When we walk him at the college while Sam is in class it doesn’t really show with accuracy where we went. You could say that this is a failure. I say at least I knew the direction he went. Until you have spent hours randomly looking for a dog, who does not even bark, out in the woods where he could run for miles in any direction and not be seen you cannot appreciate how helpful it is to just know which direction to go is. Would I trust him off leash? Not in a million years. This collar is not about just being able to fling the doors open and let him go. This collar is about adding another level of protection and peace of mind to all of our lives.
When we walk Taz he has his harness on which has three body straps with one being around the belly which has a smaller measurement than his chest so pulling it over his head will be more difficult. He has his collar on and he has his Fi collar on. He has two leashes hooked to him one on his original collar and one on his harness. No leash is attached to the Fi even though it seems very strong. I want the tracker to just do one job, track. We carry our cell phones with us as well as a bag of his favorite treat so that IF he gets off leash again the phones will have the tracking app up and ready and I have treats to lure him back. That’s how paranoid I am. We also have been trying to really get an understanding of the app during this calm time so that if we ever need it we are not trying to deal with looking for him and learning the app at the same time.
Things I did not think I would need but I appreciate are the activity monitors and sleep monitors. We use the step monitor a lot to confirm that he did get enough active time in during a day to keep even a husky happy. The sleep thing might seem silly but some studies have tied poor sleep to bad behavior in dogs so knowing how he was during the night helps to maybe understand the next day. Also if he was up all night why did that happen? Maybe we need to figure out what is going on here at night. Since the app tracks every time he leaves the safe zone and where he went we are also able to form an idea of where he might like to go if he gets off leash, like where are his favorite place. Extra benefit is that every time Sam is driving to class, sitting in class or at work and his alarm goes off that says Taz has left the safe zone he experiences a slight cardiac event. This is priceless given the number of times that his father and I have had slight cardiac events which were related to something he did.
