For many, their pet is a part of the family and when they go missing it can cause a lot of stress and anxiety. Now, one man explains how a new collar has given him some peace of mind when it comes to looking after his dogs.
Bill Otterbein and his husband Mike have three dogs, Dallas, Chloe, and the youngest dog, Quinn.
“He’s been with us three months now,” Bill said while playing fetch in the front yard of their Placitas home.
In those few months, Bill and Mike have learned Quinn is quite the escape artist, getting out of their fenced in yard a handful of times. They adopted Quinn from NMDOG, a shelter that specializes in dogs who didn’t been treated the best in previous homes.
“They told me that huskies have a tendency to run and I’ve never had a husky before so they included a Fi collar, a GPS tracking collar, when we adopted Quinn,” Bill explained.
The collar is connected to an app called Fi, in the app Bill and Mike can set up “safe zones” so any time Quinn leaves that zone they get a notification.
“So, the day he got away I was on the computer working on emails and I got a flash across the screen that Quinn is off the property without the owner,” Bill said pulling up the Fi app on his phone and showing us a map.
“The day that he escaped that’s the track he took, he went out that way I was notified when he left the property then I drove to that spot there and started calling him he came then we drove back home.”
A very different experience from the last time one of his dogs got out.
“One of the animals we had before, Ricky, he ran away and he was gone for 45 minutes and it was probably the longest 45 minutes of my life cause I didn’t know where he was."
But now, thanks to this collar, Bill says he has a new peace of mind, knowing where his family is at all times.
“Our pets are they are so important to us when they disappear your world crumbles,” Bill said.
