FindMyCat – Open-Source Pet Tracker
findmycat.io
findmycat.io
I also noticed, like others here, that the tracker's size is a problem. My cat managed to remove the collar with my smaller tracker in just two minutes. I've been considering designing an even more compact tracker, integrating it into the collar itself. It would include a battery, GPS, LoRa with an antenna, and a microcontroller with power management. I'd use a small Heltec LoRa+Bluetooth transceiver for this.
Your work has inspired me to revisit my old project. Thanks!
I really don't like the idea of attaching a lithium ion battery to my dog's neck, and I never learned how to design PCB's, so I'd also like to revisit my project with some improvements.
Still I hope to see new and improved iteration of it!
Back in 2012 I was using a Zoombak for my cats, which was designed for dogs. Eventually one of them started getting less and less fur under his collar because the Zoombak was wiggling back and forth as he was running, causing the collar to chafe.
He didn’t seem to mind it though, and eventually he’d recognize my car as I drove to pick him up. He’d jump into the back seat like a dog right when the door opened. I miss that fella.
For a traditional cat collar, you might have an engraved nametag the size of a quarter. Even an apple airtag is clunky in comparison - and this thing looks several times the size of an airtag.
It's impressively small for something with LTE, and a multi-month battery life, it's just a lot bigger than a quarter.
The main missing thing from this is waterproof design. Doesn't need to survive immersion (unless you have a Turkish Van) but it will get damp as the cat pushes through wet undergrowth or if the cat gets caught by a sudden shower.
Main things would be an ip67 rated usb connector, and a channel for rubber seal along the case join.
(edited to add)
From the STL, this is much bigger than a tabcat. The tabcat is 23x33x12mm in its silicone cover. This is ~27x60x13mm.
Another handy feaure of the tabcat (although not essential) is a beeper.
The ones with more than Bluetooth try to be clever to preserve power and only enable the other radios in certain situations. I haven't found one that does this well yet. I would prefer they use more power and track better. For something moving like a cat, you really need better tracking.
There are a few uses cases I want to work well:
1) I want to know when my cat leaves home and then be able to find him with realtime GPS.
2) I want to find my cat when he's home. He can easily decide to nap under a bush in my yard and then he's impossible to find.
The most common one I see people using is Tractive. I personally found it literally useless. When you're close to home, it only enables Bluetooth and your phone app is basically looking for the signal strength of the tracker's Bluetooth. I found that my phone (Samsung Ultra S22) didn't sense my cat unless I was 15-20ft away, which isn't very helpful as I already have to know where he is.
The one I decided to use is JioBit. When you're close to home (based on it sensing your home wifi) it only has Bluetooth enabled but it makes a connection to your phone. I found this to work over about 50ft. When connected, you can ring a bell on the tracker and find your cat. Pretty useful. When your cat is away from home, it only updates the GPS location every 5-15 minutes over LTE which I find too infrequent. Another annoyance is that it only does GPS tracking when your cat is too far from your home wifi. My cat can get way beyond Bluetooth range but still close enough to detect my wifi and then I have no tracking at all.
What I would really like is something like the JioBit but with better connectivity. I want:
1) It to check in with a server every few minutes. Using wifi when home or LTE when not home. I want this because I want to be able to enable realtime gps tracking when I'm looking for my cat.
2) When realtime tracking is enabled, actually be realtime. Give me updates every 15 seconds at least.
3) Give me the ability to ring the device over wifi or LTE.
The JioBit can last a few weeks in its current mode. I'm willing to cut that down significantly. And I really don't mind it burning power when I'm actively trying to find my cat.
You'd be able to do the switch over from low frequency check-ins to high frequency with the RX slot that comes after a TX slot, but the only issue would be having to wait for a check-in before the realtime mode is activated. But with a sufficient, ~5 minute, low-frequency check-in period, I'd imagine that's a small inconvenience.
A bit too big for a cat. Also doesn't have bluetooth or a speaker so you can't narrow the location once you get close (you could add an airtag for that, more $, more bulk).
Waterproof.
Relatively inexpensive.
Has a documented API or you can use the Petovik app to track 1 item for free.
Can change modes by sending a command through the SIM providers SMS command or through one of the tools linked in the Petovik app (the command is only received when the device is "awake"). The modes with highest resolution allows 10 sec updates. There is also a "LOCK" mode which lets you switch to high frequency updates for a specified period of time.
Battery life is almost a day if you use "sleep when not moving mode" and set updates to every 2 minutes or so.
Which is 47 mm x 30 mm x 15 mm vs the Mictrack's 46mm x 41mm x 16mm - and that 11 extra mm would make it not work on a collar. Fitbark does have Bluetooth.
I keep dreaming up a very simple (ish) solution involving a never-obstructed camera at ingress points like a doorway where it can reliably track whether the cat is in our out of the house without relying on a hefty device they have to wear.
I don't understand how that location is too infrequent. Too infrequent for what? If you are trying to chase them around the garden then an audible ringer is going to be better than 15 second updates.
The catch is that my cat's use case (being mostly outdoors, mostly out of Bluetooth range, and mostly draining power) doesn't match the engineering design model of a dog who's with you most of the time and might escape on occasion. They gave me a more power-conserving build, though.
The one anomaly here is one I've noticed with Pokémon Go as well: "rounding" locations to be at the street even when the cat isn't even within BT range of the street. (For privacy reasons in PoGo's case, after multiple lawsuits.) The one time this is particularly annoying is when our fuzzball is hunting lizards in the local schoolyard at night, and the tracker says she's on the street next to the schoolyard, but she's somewhere in the middle of it.
In practice, that means I know where my little darling was 10 minutes ago, rounded to the nearest street, and use a Bluetooth tracking app to narrow it down further. Naturally, a good third of the time, she's within BT range and just Not Interested™ in moving from wherever she happens to be. (We try to keep her fed on a regular schedule to reduce wildlife consumption.)
We're going to try FindMyCat on the other cat (who currently doesn't have a tracker) and see how that goes. He spends more time at home.
It is 20 hours in gps mode:
https://www.findmycat.io/docs/TrackerModes#summary
I have a Jiobit. It starts in ble mode and switches to gps when the cat exits a 30 m radius. It gets about 8 hours of fulll gps gsm battery life once it starts updating every 60 seconds. Normally it is 2 weeks battery life.
Note I take my cat out supervised in a large fenced in yard. He got away from me thrice over seven years. This is just a temporary safety feature now. He’s never ventured more than 100m during his getaways.
Apple air tags last for 12 months apparently
This basically keeps a microprocessor busy which uses energy.
One trick people do for ultra-low energy non-realtime GPS tracking of wildlife is to store the “raw” radio samples and do as little processing on the tracking device as possible.[1] Then once the tracker gets back they batch process all the samples recorded and reconstruct where the animal has been. That is obviously a tradeoff of more storage used for less energy consumption. Obviously that trick does not work if you want to know where the animal is live, it can only tell you where it has been once you have processed the data.
I'm not aware of how all of them are implemented internally, but my understanding is that the acquisition&tracking of signals usually happens in the digital domain. Can be wrong on that of course.
The problem is the signal processing part of GPS is quite computationally difficult. I think it was around 10ish years ago it even became possible to do the full real-time decoding on a laptop. At startup, you need to find the GPS signals. This means searching for all 32 possible satellite code patterns across the range of possible Doppler shifts. During testing, this was what took most of the startup (cold start) time. You need roughly 4-6 of them to get a position, so this has to be done in parallel. Once you've found the satellite it takes another 30 seconds to get the satellite position. GPS signals are very slow at 50 bits/sec.
By comparison, actually solving for location is a simple linear algebra problem with 4 unknowns (lat, long, alt, time; but in a more convenient coordinate system). You only do this a few times per second. The hardware does the higher rate signal phase estimation. For example the navspark is a single core SPARC microcontroller running at 100MHz with 200 kB of RAM. That's enough to do 50 solutions per second, though they reduced that to 10 Hz to make space for a user program too.
A ton of work goes into caching strategies to narrow down that initial search space. Modern chips will let you load in exactly which satellites to expect overhead (e.g. based on position and orbit info from cell network). There is a whole other caching strategy based on a approximate "almanac" in the GPS signal for offline devices. With all of that known before the receiver turns on, you can get a solution in a couple seconds.
why can't you just forward those radio samples back, and process that on the receiver end (your phone), vs processing on device and sending back the location?
It should be a tradeoff of less battery consumption on device, and no need for large storage, at the expense of a lot more bandwidth? Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
Yes. I believe so.
> Would having to send all the raw samples consume more or less battery than just processing it and sending the result?
Good question. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe someone can chime in?
What would be interesting if you could send a "ping" signal to the tracker and it only start sending samples back then. After all most of the time you don't need to know where the cat is, only when it is "overdue" and the owner starts worrying.
* The Nyquist-Shannon theorem actually says the converse, but for anything you'll encounter outside the recesses of a math department, it's still the optimal solution.
Maybe it might be worth it for a complete "from scratch" GPS fix (where the receiver needs to figure out where it approximately is and needs to re-download the complete GPS almanach and ephemerides), though – I have no idea how short a server-side-decodeable sample actually is!
But since we're talking about a network-connected device anyway, I'd guess that downloading the ephemerides via the IoT connection (single-digit kilobytes) would be much more economical in that case too.
Maybe as an analogy, consider local vs. cloud QR code decoding: If you can manage to send a single, shart photo of the code, the cloud might be better, but since you can't actually be sure when the camera is pointed at the code and not moving, you might need to take a minute-long video, and look for the one non-blurry frame on the cloud.
Edit: Just saw the other comment – apparently we're talking about a short video moreso than a small JPEG :)
And here's an interesting research paper on the topic: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Sending to your phone via radio? If the phone is in range you don't need GPS. You can use UWB or an audible beeper to find the cat.
"Ordinary" antennas are completely passive, just a bit of metal. It's the maths for data recovery and trilateration (not triangulation!) that is processor heavy.
You can read here[1] more about what the RF frontend does. This is the crux of it: “Its two-stage receiver amplifies the incident 1575.42MHz GPS signal, downconverts it to a first IF of 37.38MHz, further amplifies it, and then downconverts to a second IF of 3.78MHz. An internal 2- or 3-bit ADC (selectable as a 1-bit sign with a 1- or 2-bit magnitude) samples the second IF and outputs a digitized signal to the baseband processor.”
1: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/rf-frontend-ic-...
I guess my fundamental confusion is why "listening" to a broadcast signal takes so much power, vs say a FM receiver or passive wifi snooping.
Weak signal, small antenna, high gain, lots of current to run amplifiers. And you need to keep receiving signal to get the position, not just enable it for a second then disable
It happens to cats all the time when you live near farms, you either get used to it or learn to keep your cat indoor.
(If you only ever 'adopt' stray cats, it's a reasonable coping strategy to consider their presence somewhat ephemeral)
Important to note that this fellow has already published detailed engineering notes, BOMs, all of the gerbers. I believe this really matters when taking this to KickStarter, which is exactly what he should do.
One thing to consider is that many animals will not wear collars. However, they might wear a well-designed harness.
I currently rely on an AirTag, and for the most part it’s great as long as someone’s iPhone is nearby. However, I’m missing that GPS component.
I’d pay for this as I currently don’t have the time to build it nor the experience in building PCBs. Could be a fun project at some point, though.
Turned out to be a scam with legal address in farm in UK. Collar came but it was extremely poor quality, didn't match pics on the website, app was crap, GPS was not really working (it felt that it is tracking my phone's GPS that usually is off).
Can't get to trying another product.
You cannot expect a 4G + GPS to have a long battery life.
With the collar that comes with it, he loses it every couple of weeks usually nearby bushes but we always find it and everything is good to go from there.
But it comes with a subscription.
[1] https://lowpowerlab.com/forum/rf-range-antennas-rfm69-librar...
This cat tracker might just free my wallet from its paracord prison.
It prevents from losing the wallet in the first place, once it is lost it's a much bigger problem...
I don't remember how it started exactly, but given the number of cat owners on the team, I started joking that I wanted to repurpose our tech and start a cat tracking app called "locatify."
Not only has the name locatify since been taken, I keep seeing references to cat tracking solutions everywhere!
I wanted to call it Pussy Control but my wife wouldn't let me.
But vehicles don't need the indoor tracking, or the home base station, and when moving have nigh-unlimited battery power available.
So I imagine it depends on how much those features are adding to the price. Also, it looks like the device isn't commercially available, and with BGAs etc it's not easy to DIY either.
The cost of the device is less than $100, excluding the cellular data cost.
The most expensive component, the DWM3001CTR13 Ultra-WideBand module, is $37.77 in single quantities. I don't know much about about UWB, but I wonder if instead putting a BLE beacon on the tracker and using a chip supporting Bluetooth direction finding on the home station could allow the tracker to be a bit smaller and cheaper at the cost of some localization performance for the indoor mode (actually I just saw someone already brought this up in the project Slack).
This isn't including the Home Station part which doesn't seem fully documented yet.It looks like there is more discussion on the project Slack.
This is a cool project, though. One thing I didn't see is, how much does it cost to make this in practice?
I think the problem is that these trackers get a lot of their benefits from network effects. I own a bunch of Tiles, and I find them really useful, but if I lose my luggage somewhere I'll only get a ping if they happen to be in range of another phone that also has the Tile app.
Meanwhile, with AirTags, given the prevalence of iPhones in the US, you're much likely to be in range of someone with an iPhone at most times.
> In addition, Google is updating its Find My Device experience to make it easier to locate devices by ringing them or viewing their location on a map — even if they’re offline, it says.
> This, too, will arrive later this summer, along with new support for Bluetooth trackers from Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee, as well as audio devices like Pixel Buds and headphones from Sony and JBL.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/10/googles-find-my-device-net...
But that doesn't sell phones via lockin.
Personally, I would be jumping in if I could buy a fully populated PCB and take care of 3D printing, final assembly and software. However, doing electronics like this is far out of my wheelhouse.
I'd love to own the data from that collar, but I also looked into the BOM of doing this, and (considering what my time is worth doing the full-stack embedded electronics thing) it was absolutely cheaper to buy it and lose access to the data. It's a lot cheaper than fully fencing 2.5 acres out in the country.
why not get him an Apple watch and put it in an exercise mode so it records GPS coords as he goes, synced to his own iCloud account?
He's an 80lb Belgian Malinois, a breed known for their high drive, and for being pretty scary looking. People out here keep goats, horses, chickens, etc. He knows not to go after our chickens, but do the neighbors know he won't go after theirs? The last thing I want is for him to wander onto a neighbor's property and get shot because he looks like he's helping himself to their livestock. He'll get shot for that (or less), and I'd have zero recourse, even legally.
The Halo collar is the exact same price (including data plan) as the apple watch, but I trade remote feedback to him if he leaves the property (and a collar ruggedized to the rigors of an active dog), vs owning the data, but on a device that's not at all designed to be worn by a dog that likes to roll in dead fish and coyote shit. Meanwhile, adequately fencing the property (so he won't jump over it) will cost me between $12k and $30k. Compare that to $700 + $5/month.
> a dog that likes to roll in dead fish and coyote shit
that is like every normal dog, at least I know exactly what you describe!
No, I won't wish I had fenced the property. I'll wish I'd done a better job of training my dog.
It's cheaper than fencing thousands of feet of perimeter, anyway.
My only hope is that in the future Apple designs an AirTag mini of sorts. Right now they're juust on the edge of being too big to keep strapped around their necks. They don't really seem to care, even at the current size, though.
Any way to shrink/lighten the AirTag?
I only know very roughly where the tag is. Its location is still being updated after two years. (Lost mode activated: Sept 6, 2021. Last seen 16 minutes ago.) I used to think it was two doors down, but its somewhere near the end of the block.
That's it. I have no better idea, because I have to be near it to make it beep, and I can't make it beep. The arrow mode doesn't trigger because I'm not close enough to it. Once -- and only once -- did the signal get strong enough to trigger mode, but it went away before I could do anything.
AirTags kind of suck. Even when I was playing with the tag in the house, I could only get the beep/arrow mode to work when I was in the same room with it, and at that point, I could literally see it.
If yours isn't I´d suggest setting up slocate.
I was playing with the UWB on my Samsung S23 my cat was beside me. As I enabled it she jerked her head towards my phone. I know UWB is far beyond a cat's hearing range but whatever it was she instantly noticed it. No pain or anything she didn't run away but looked at it as if she could detect something.
Consider that in the US, UWB is RF higher than 500MHz, and I’d be shocked if your phone’s speaker went all the way up to 20KHz, which is generally considered to be the upper limit of the human hearing range.
I adjusted my wifi to cover a bit more of my garden area and since then battery life has increased to 2-3 days.
The only other problem I foresee is if your cat refuses to wear the thing and pulls it off :D
Ideal device (for a bike) would:
Fit inside the handlebar
Have eSIM support and 5g
Open sw/hw
Bring-your-own data eSIM
This comes pretty close already.
It could be awesome with tech like "Energy Harvesting Module that Efficiently Generates Power from Electromagnetic Wave Noise"[1].
If only big tech where thinking like you and opened their research...
In EU I'm using a LoRa/GPS based pet tracker[2], but it's not enough to quickly find a lost pet.
This is a great example of engineers optimizing the wrong thing.
After that I looked in to GPS trackers for pets and it's all either subscription services (and their implications on your data/privacy) or otherwise some cheap Chinese crap.
I eventually found one of the cheap ones you could configure with traccar but to get that working took a lot of guessing and testing. The cool thing is the only command that works via the server is "change update period", so when it's at home it pings occasionally and when it's outside the geofence, traccar tells it to up the reporting rate. (Plus idle detection, so when her harness is hanging there's limited battery use)
I'm glad to see an open solution like this, would have loved to set this up if I had the dog longer term.
Our cats on the other hand, we never trained for a collar so this wouldn't work unfortunately
1nce for example charges €10 for 500MB of data which lasts 10 years. Assuming you are economical with the data it's €1 a year, which is a very appealing price point. Even if you need 500MB a year that's still less than €1 a month.
Hologram charge by the MB (although I'm not sure exactly how much as their pricing page isn't fully transparent), with a 70¢ a month charge per SIM card. I think they offer a free SIM card with a certain amount of data a month free (maybe 1MB) if you just want 1 SIM card.
Except during or in the leadup to thunderstorms. She was afraid of thunder and would hide.
I'd love to see what she gets up to when she's away since there really isn't any houses nearby (maybe 1/4 mile away at the closest). Unfortunately we don't have cell service outside of the booster range in the house so this wouldn't do much for me
But I support this nonetheless!
You get what you pay for.
Find my cat needs GPS and LTE when outside your home, and has shit battery when using it, just like the commercial offering.
The software is a fairly convoluted stack that you'll have to setup, self-host, and maintain. And that's shit from most people's POV.
> The nRF9160 supports both SIM and eSIM for connection
[0] https://github.com/FindMyCat/engineering-docs/blob/main/LICE...
“Completely Open-Source? What’s the catch?
Yup. No catch. All Software and Hardware files can be found in the Engineering section and the Github page under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License”.
This is in the Frequent Questions section. (You need to click on the question to see the answer.)
They kill so much native wildlife.
It’s greatly helpful when they escape.
When she escapes I open Find My and I generally visually find the cat with my eyes before the phone even picks the signal up. It keeps the "Get closer..." and only actually shows the arrow when I'm like 5 meters from it.
I have iPad iPhone Mac Apple TV Airpods, more stuff and a bunch of Apple services. Honestly my most disappointing Apple purchase.
In case it matters, phone is 13 Pro.
Regardless the project looks very cool and informative.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/-/news-collar-warning-after-cat-die...
Of course you could add a quick release/stretchy part to the collar so it is safe, but that also means that the tracker would easily get lost (especially if the cat isnt used to collars since kittenhood, they tend to be too annoyed by them and try to remove them)
Also, whats the point of a tracker if its not on the cat?
If it do falls off (by mistake or because the quick release did its intended job), at least you now have a good starting point where to go search for the cat. Assuming it doesn't fall off the very first day, you might also have a good idea or sense of in which area the cats normally goes strolling due to the tracking feature.
Well, if your cat is one that tolerates a collar most of the time, he'll have the tracker on most of the time, which is better than no tracking at all. One of our cats tolerates a collar without any problem.
The dog GPS collars made by e.g. Whistle are waterproof, IPX8.
You might not get a cell signal under a couple of feet of water, but that much water also means you probably aren't finding the gadget even if you have a recent GPS fix.
For those worried about collars, I can confirm that https://www.coolcatcollars.co.uk collars do come off. You can also use a luggage scale to measure the force it takes to release.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37511036
And the old saying "knows just enough to be dangerous".
The fact they got this far without knowing this safety information is concerning, to say the least.
For an indoor outdoor-occasionally GPS-tracked cat, collars are fine. There is no case where they will get themselves into trouble and be unaccompanied to ruin.
As a multiple cat owner with decades of experience and someone who has rescued many cats off the street in NY(T&R because yes its not good to have hundreds of strays per block), you downvoters have zero context here and your comments have been nothing but opinions.
Heres a super simple usecase that can shut you all up. People have indoor cats escape! This is traumatizing to owners, like a family member being abducted. It can go on for months and yes, people find their pets (we did), at great cost and burden.
And before you go claiming irresponsibility, this happen to us when someone broken into our unit. So fuck off please.
There is research on how indoor cars live happier healthier lives that are yes 10x longer, because outdoor cats literally die at 1 and 2 years old (they are adults) and indoor cats live to be 20+
I think the design is too big and the battery life too uncompelling but open source means better luck at being improved. Amazon sells a lot of bunk as I’ve tried a few and only had luck with jiobit. I’d like to tinker with this.
And PS, I like to rant at hacker news, the community is so boring otherwise.
I just wish it were smaller.
I’ve heard a collar might help with that.
A lot of people with indoor cats also leash train them.
The fourth cat doesn't have one because she can't eat kibble without it causing urinary problems.
Where do you live? We had outdoor cats live until they were 19 and 17, both passed from age-related illness. Relatively calm neighborhood away from any heavy traffic, granted; but still.
For one, the average area of a house in the USA seems to be above 2000 square feet, whereas here in the UK it's more like 750 or so.
It feels worse for the animal to be cramped in a tiny space all their life, so we let them outside. Also there are no predators apart from the occasional domesticated dog, so it's safer. The biggest risk is traffic, which is dependent on where you live.
The bird thing brought up every time is weird to me, because no one seems to care about birds until cats are part of the conversation, suddenly birds are the most important part of the ecosystem.
Of the current cat with free-ish outdoor access: Last year birds accounted for 3.6 percent of all recorded catches (5/138). This year birds are 1.7 percent of all recorded catches (1/58). And all of the birds I've seen caught first knocked themselves out striking windows, or flew inside the house via open door and injured themselves trying to escape in panic. The healthy ones don't let cats near them at all.
Of the prior cat, zero birds over 9 years. Of the cat before that, maybe 1 or 2 birds over 18 years.
Of course anecdotes aren't data etc, but, the impact of data is its story, and anecdotes direct and constrain the collection and analysis of data.
We've had no cats that lived between 3 and 16 years.
I have no idea why. To some degree you could get a sense which category a cat was in within the first year or so.
If I were to guess I think a cat will probably have a shorter life span in a city. More cars and more opportunities to get infected with diseases from other cats.
Those cats (or people) who make it through that crisis will gain some hard humility forever more and seem to go on for a long time after. Those who don't, well, obviously that's it. I had two big male cats back in the 90s, who being tough young males naturally once they got to 2-3 years old felt pretty confident. First of them sadly vanished and never saw him again. The second a few years later got into some fight or flight with/from something, I don't know what, but there were shrieks. But he escaped/fought and I found him. Forever after he was very careful, he'd go out the door onto the porch and whereas before he'd just instantly head off, after he'd immediately sit down and observe/listen for a good long while first. He lived to 21 years old. Another outdoor/indoor lived to 19.
It is truly hard to take the risk, but they're so much happier for it. We all reach the same end in the end, so I feel very strongly that there are limits to how far one should take "being safe". And there are good ways to massively reduce the bird issue. I love birds as well, but 3-5 caught per year when I'm feeding and support orders of magnitude more birds than that seems acceptable.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Downvoted and flagged.
All my cats (all neutered) never tried to escape from our old city apartment, aside the obvious exploring the hall beyond the house door, and now that we live in a small town in a cottage with garden and trees my two cats both enjoy wandering around the property, but they eventually come home for the night. It wasn't that easy: they had to fight for territory since this property has been kept empty for years so that it was easily taken by the neighborhood cats, but so far it looks like our cats won.
Hard disagree here. All four of my cats are spayed or neutered and the one is determined to go out and explore. She will sneak behind your back and fly through the door as it closes. She looks peaceful and sleeping across the room, but don't let that fool you -- she springs to life and flies out the door when you least expect it.
She once escaped through a basement window, about 6 feet above the floor with no objects below it, through a gap which was just a few inches wide. I got her back about three days later by setting up a motion activated camera and a bowl of food outside.
I've fostered over 50 cats now so I feel like I know and understand their behavior pretty well by this point.
We don't disagree here, I never wrote that neutered/spayed cats don't want to explore, that's normal behavior for every feline out there, but that those who aren't can suffer a lot from being forced home. For cats which aren't spayed or neutered it isn't just about exploring anymore but satisfying their urge to mate, and they won't return until that need is satisfied, if they do.
1) One of our (indoor, house) cats is always keen to escape, and as such currently wears a breakaway collar with an Airtag attached via a 3D-printed holder, which seemed the best available solution. He copes with that without a problem, so if this isn't too much bigger then I'm sure it would also be fine, and I'd definitely upgrade him to this hardware.
2) I know that this HN, and people love to be experts and poke at any available hole, but let's assume good intent and not go overboard on the 'dangerous collar' thing. I totally agree that the picture on the website is wrong, but it looks like a render, and as such has probably been farmed out to someone who doesn't know better. Stick this on a decent-quality breakaway collar and you should be fine. (Anecdata: of our two housecats, one will remove any breakaway collar within minutes; the other one doesn't care and his collar only comes off every few months if it gets caught during a cat-on-cat play-fight.)
3) Also agree that there's huge potential in this market for tracking many other things - proven by the success of the Airtag.
1. Zero cost for cat tracking devices, never need to charge them, never need to worry about the cat losing the device.
2. Dramatically reduced chance of your cat being killed by a car. Despite blogs claiming otherwise, I can find no reputable statistics on the number of pets killed by cars in the US, but there are >250k collisions with animals every year. Most are deer, but anecdotally I know many many people who have killed cats accidentally.
3. Dramatically reduced chance of your cat being killed by a coyote or raccoon. Yes, coyotes and raccoons will absolutely fuck up your cat. Yes, they are very likely in your city.
4. Your cat will not be playing a part in the wholesale slaughter of billions of birds, small mammals, reptiles, and other fauna that domesticated cats are responsible for.
5. Significantly longer predicted lifespan for your cat. The life expectancy for an indoor cat is about 14 years. For an outdoor cat, it's 2 to 5 years.
6. Your neighbors will appreciate not stumbling onto your cat's poop while gardening.
Seriously, keep your cat indoors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Forest_cat
More seriously - biggest danger is probably cars.
I doubt any of the cats I've ever had would approve of this
It just takes some time to train them usually. It's much easier if you get them used to it early in their lifetime, though.
https://daily.jstor.org/environmental-danger-outdoor-cats/
There’s the academic source, and for my anecdotal one my family’s yard in Connecticut is much quieter on a June afternoon today than it was 20 years ago.
There are responsible ways to keep indoor cats entertained. If someone can’t do that, then it seems to me they’re just as unsuited to having a pet as if they couldn’t keep it fed.
Maybe, it make sense to not generalize and firstly get some information where cats are more welcome and where not.
Cats (as a predators) keep population of birds, small mammals, reptiles, and other fauna healthy. Or we should ignore this because its false?
(and yes, pigeons are feral, not wild! They are a domesticated species)
What about hamsters and guinea pigs?
Plenty of cats are perfectly happy to remain indoors. I have a cat who was rescued from the streets as a kitten. She actively refuses to go outside unless she is accompanied by a person, and even then, not for very long.
But even if you do want to let your cats live outdoor lives, that's no reason to just let them loose on the environment.
Yes, I wouldn't describe it as torture.
I have seen what an outdoor cat does when it gets its paws on a lizard, snake, baby bird, or mouse. That's torture.
nah, you're just an uncreative person. you can be involved in your pets stimulation. seeing that you think having a pet inside is just confining, i feel pretty correct assuming you see pets as just an animal you hang out with and feed and not a responsibility to nourish. instead, have the outdoors do your work for you! and if they die, so be it. shows a lot of love and care :)
If they can't reproduce, then feeding them actually reduces the harm they cause because they won't need to go out hunting for food.
I will say, though, as someone with cats who are escape artists, I love this product, I'd find it invaluable. We already have AirTags on them but it's an imperfect solution.
That's completely unfounded speculation and wishful-thinking.
Would you like for cats to deposit their parasite-laden (human-infecting, incurable) feces in your herb garden, where your children play, or directly outside of a window you need for ventilation? If so, than there are certainly others who would not. Basic decency demands that you don't facilitate this.
It's not 'speculation' to suggest that logically, an animal which is not hungry won't expend energy to hunt for food.
> Basic decency demands that you don't facilitate this.
Basic decency demands showing compassion to animals in need. But if there's one thing I'm seeing in this thread, it's lots of people who seem to think their views on these matters are moral universals.
> Would you like for cats to deposit their parasite-laden (human-infecting, incurable) feces in your herb garden, where your children play, or directly outside of a window you need for ventilation?
Do you even know how cats decide where to poop, or what they do with their feces? Cat feces doesn't just sit out, they bury them. While it's true feral animals - including many cats - harbor parasites, healthy cats are typically fastidiously clean. Much cleaner than dogs, and I should know, I have both.
You have awfully strong opinions but they don't seem like they're based in much knowledge.
Your argument remains as merely some vague hand-waving, still with no evidence presented.
https://www.unitedspayalliance.org/feral-cats-if-you-feed-th... https://www.felina-sicily.org/en/how-to/to-feed-or-not/ https://www.feralcats.com/good-neighbor https://spayneuterspringfield.org/feral-cat-info
and here's a study describing what happens when one doesn't take this approach:
https://www.dvm360.com/view/feral-cats-fed-not-cared
All of these were on the first page of Google for 'feeding neutered feral cats only if fixed' or 'feeding neutered feral cats only if fixed study'
What I'm suggesting is standard and recommended practice.
But given that you think people who like cats are "toxo+ cat lunatics," I think there's no productivity in this exchange. You clearly have some really strong biases, and you've made clear what I was already inferring from your comments - you won't agree with anything that doesn't support your incorrect viewpoint.
Keep your cat vaccines up-to-date, neuter them and have regular checkups. An indoor cat is a miserable life, intended to be an object of some over-controlling miserable person who is afraid of life and want everyone else to be as miserable, paranoid and afraid as them.
But I guess you don't do much of either.
The thing is, like everyone of us, you'll die someday, you'll get sick, probably even very sick as you age. You can't cheat death, disease and suffering for ever. You can do the reasonable stuff to take care of you, avoiding really stupid stuff like DUI, hard drugs, cigarretes, excessive drinking, too much sugar, but you need to understand that this only goes so far, and that in average, it is not liking you are going to double your lifespan if you became completely anal about preventing risk. Sooner or later, no much how paranoid you are your cellular machinery will star failing, and no, you won't be able to upload your life to the cloud and live forever in the metaverse as much as your average incult billionaire tech bro believes.
And when this day comes, the question that really matters is not if you are going to die soon, but wether you have ever lived.
Now, you are free, and if you want to live in a super-afraid-karen modem the rest of your life, none of our business. But don't force an animal to share your miserable outlook of life. If you are so worried about the cat bringing those dangerous germs to your house, nobody is forcing you to have a cat.
Cats deposit the parasite in gardens, so your suggestion that this vector of infection is unrelated to roaming cats is misleading.
Keep them indoors.
No, but there is traffic and plenty of people who take objection to cats fouling their gardens and will happily leave out a saucer of antifreeze.
If you live in an urban area, the kindest thing to do is keep you cat indoors.
Source: I’ve had both indoor and outdoor cats, including cats that transitioned to outdoor after being raised indoor. Lost one outdoor cat tragically in middle of his lifespan. But his equally-outdoor brother lived to 19, and all the outdoor cats hands down seemed happier on average (less lethargic, less neurotic, less obsessive, less overeating).
One source suggests anywhere from 2x to 10x increase in life expectancy.
Your very post (and Wikipedia link) undermines the argument you are tying to make.
You are letting your very obvious personal bias determine your interpretation of what is an objective fact.
[1] https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/native-fauna#:~:text=N....
So the discussion to have here is 'do we accept having domesticated animals in environments they didn't originate from'.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/domestica...
... so they are domesticated and not native... ???
By definition, domestic animals and plants have no native home except with humans. This is why we call domestic cats who escape and live in the wild "feral," not "wild," because a feral animal is specifically a domestic animal not living with humans, not a non-domestic native animal. It does not matter whether they 'domesticated themselves' or not, they are a domestic species and therefore not equatable with a wild one.
As a result, your point simply makes no sense. Domestic cats have no 'native lands' because they are not and cannot be 'native' anywhere except in human settlements.
https://www.science.org/content/article/genes-turned-wildcat...
http://www.jabg.org/view/JABG_202303_02.pdf
from the looks of it, you found an inkling of confirmation and rolled with it. you think you got a science backing for your ideas, but nah, wrong. remind yourself when you read all the articles claiming "near identical DNA!" that human DNA is ~1.6% different from gorilla DNA. geneticists are seeing larger differences between domestic and wild cat species.
> Can you point out the part of the article that disagrees with the assertion "cats are domestic animals"?
This is neither relevant nor the issue being discussed. It is a straw man, and you all too well know this. No one has at any point claimed that there are not domestic cats.
The entire point made was that cats are a native species in many parts of Europe, and that research shows not only that cats domesticated themselves, but that domestic and wild cats are genetically almost identical. The fact that domestic cats exist does not prevent native wild cats from also existing.
That said, this product looks like it can help people who lose their indoor cats, which happens. I recently helped rescue a neighbors cat who snuck out and stayed outside for 2 full months.
Over time you can get rid of the leash and just walk side by side.
My cat was 10 when we moved to a ground floor apartment, so we couldn't realistically prevent him from escaping, so we started walking him. He lived over 16 years, the last two of which he would only go outside to lay in the bushes.
Deer, possums, raccoons, and other wildlife who live outdoors seem incapable of learning how to avoid it, so it's unclear my cat will either.
Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
Or, you only notice the ones which have been killed. Otherwise, deer, possum and raccoon populations should decrease pretty fast. And of feral cats of course.
> Further as mentioned in my post, my parents essentially ran your experiment already with the result being every male cat we had dying in under 5 years due to being hit by cars.
I'm sorry to hear that, but I am curious why it was only the male cats. Perhaps they are less skittish? What happened to the female cats?
> So no, I don't think it's a great idea to let your cat outdoors in most reasonably populated & dense areas of the US.
Alright, but I would hope you can at least agree that keeping cats indoors all the time is not preparing them for the outdoors, in the cases when they do slip out.
All animals should be free, if you can't provide freedom to your animals then you should not have any.
What about the fact that animals introduced to an environment by humans in the name of "freedom" cause disproportionate harm to other animals? Whose freedom wins?
I'm sure it seems easy to you to not have animal companions, but plenty of rational people place a lot more value on it than you do.
Your point of view is based on faulty assumptions about the importance of that experience.
It's the same as cigarets, you know it's toxic to you and others but still you want it regardless.
PS: I love cats and always had one until few years back but I don't want to have one to force him to stay indoor, as long as I don't have a place for it to go out I won't get any.
Again, keep your cat indoors. Otherwise, you're part of the problem.
By and large, domestic US outdoor cats are not in fragile ecosystems, but they are the number one killer of birds. They roam outside along with other species (like squirrels and crows) that have had to adapt to the insane environment humans have developed.
I've always seen my pets as persons, with feeling and moods. Trapping them inside is cruel. Cats in nature are adapted to roam and explore.
My cat in the US regretably, has brought home a few birds, but all of the birds were species of least concern. Fortunately, there are a lot of cheap collars owners can use to help alert the bird of the cat's presence before predation occurs.
I recently took a course on ornithology and was stunned by how difficult a bird's life is from the migrations, predations, building collisions, and the sheer amount of work they invest in nesting and raising their young. It's easy to take them for granted until you actually understand what they go through just to exist, unlike a pampered cat who gets to kill for sport.
Cat owners who allow their cats outdoors are being cruel to birds and small animals, period. A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference. There's no way to wiggle out of this moral dilemma. If you love nature and want it balanced and protected, then keep your cat indoors. Or, if you can, train your cat to kill only invasive species.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2020/09/the-232... https://abcbirds.org/program/cats-indoors/cats-and-birds/
Of course they don't know which is of least concern, but by and large I do see everything they kill because they bring it home and I have to clean it up. It is in their nature to bring it home.
> A bell on your cat's collar doesn't make much difference.
Bells and other deterrents absolutely do make a difference (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.85044...)
There's barely any species of concern in urban environments anymore, because:
* Industrial run-off * Habitat destruction * Roads and highways with vehicles * Air pollution * Light pollution * Poisons * Electrocution from power lines * Buildings with glass (actual a #2 killer of birds!) * Hunting (both legal and illegal)
Domestic cats are merely a cherry on top of the myriad of environmental mistakes humans have made in the name of progress.
They are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
If you truly care about birds I would urge you to:
* stop driving * use no lights past dusk * not use or consume any product that contributes to air pollution * not use any power grid that uses power lines * not use any building with glass * not consume any poultry
So while you pet and play with Fluffy that evening, the mother bird she maimed earlier that day can no longer make ~100 trips a day to feed its hatchings. She tries, but can only manage a dozen or so trips. They slowly starve over the next few days despite the mother's desperate attempts.
That bird survived all the other leading causes of bird mortality, but not Fluffy. And Fluffy gets a few more bonus kills when the hatchlings expire.
I'm curious what would you do if people had a new breed of small domesticated dog that is efficient at killing outdoor cats, and those people let that dog roam like a cat?
Given that your cat is out there doing his thing, this new breed of outdoor dog is also out there doing his thing. As you said, they are simply acting on instinct and trying to be happy in a world of human creation.
His owners think he's a person. It would be cruel to lock him up all day.
But one of these dogs swiftly kills your outdoor cat. And your next cat. In fact, they're becoming the leading cause of death among outdoor cats, seconded only by cars.
Would you a) demand that dog breed not be allowed to roam because it harms cats, b) keep your next cat indoors, or c) ?
2. if your cat wants to go outdoors, you can leash them like any dog-owner is required to do. the whole "cats need to be in nature" argument is rooted in the assumption that you as the owner aren't involved in that nourishment. if you can't be a responsible cat owner (keeping it from roaming on it's own; keeping it stimulated) then don't get a pet. is the cat really a critical unit of your family if you skirt responsibility and are okay w/ it dying violently outside?
3. the US is very much a fragile ecosystem. source on it not being? we, like many other place, have had a huge and trending decline in biodiversity.
4. cats haven't adapted to the human environment; we've developed technology and laws that have protected cats in our human environment. i'm not sure how they've had to adapt as they can interact with humans safely.
5. you don't see everything your cat kills. you may be able to placate yourself that your cat isn't one of the "rampant killers", but that thought isn't based solely on fact.
Would you want to live in a cage your whole life? Then why do you want to do it to others? Never heard of the Golden Rule: "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you"?
I understand your point of view, I share it, cats are deadly to many smaller species that's why if you're against that then you shouldn't get a cat at all.
PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
And if you are living in a shoebox yourself, where you regard your own home as a "prison" or a "cage", then you have no business keeping such a pet anyway.
> PS: Australia's problem is about the Feral cats and they are making traps in the wild to poison their skin thanks to some box trap and AI.
Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason.
> Feral AND domestic. There are laws introduced in Australia that mandates cats to be kept indoors for this reason. I didn't know about the domestic one.
Many people who have cats do so by adoption of strays found in their area so not getting a cat is the same as letting a cat roam free in that area without a safe space and consistent food source.
The whole "prisoner" argument seems so dumb to me when we've already decided as a society that it's in the best interests of society to neuter/spay as many cats and dogs as possible to prevent an explosion in the stray population. Do you think we shouldn't do that because you wouldn't neuter/spay yourself?
We can have both desexing pets and letting them roam free. No need to force them to live inside.
How free are they if you consider them yours?
In a lot of ways cat's are still in the early phases of domestication and the concept of keeping them indoors only is rather new.
- Whatever attachment system is used for animal attachment, it should break open under the cat's weight or less. Otherwise you are running a hanging-to-death-site locator.
- A harness with the tracker mounted on the top (spine) seems more tolerable and robust than a collar
- Remember it is a *"collar tracker"* for your expensive purchase, not a *"cat tracker"*, and you will remain satisfied.```
$ whereis cat
cat: /bin/cat /usr/share/man/man1/cat.1
```
which cat | cat
Even the awesome non-commercial, source available project here, findmycat, relies on a cloud service.
For such a product, the cost could be quite low if done well, it could even be priced for 10 years in the initial package, assuming accounting is done properly.
Never ever will I put anything artificial on a cat again, far too dangerous.
Plus, this doesn't have the same potential for abuse as it has more limited battery life than NFC beacons.
would be nice to see on the 'Why' page [1] stats around pets lost, stolen, the need to track, bit about price etc.
as an engineering IOT project it's exciting for sure, looks good.
I mean, it doesn't impact my privacy if a GPS-tracked van drives past my home.
cameras and microphones are very cheap these days.
of course if one's not bothered about privacy, then the issue doesn't exist (magic)