George has been “Podded”!

Georgie Porgie pudding and pie / Kiss the girls and made them cry / When the boys came out to play / Georgie Porgie ran away!

Oh my goodness, the puzzle has been solved. It has always been in the verse that everyone recites. George was just living up to his name.

So it’s our fault – we gave him a name that he had to live up to!

Too late now, we can’t change his name so Mummy decided to ensure he never gets lost when he runs away.

He has a collection of fluorescent coloured Equafleeces – orange and fuchsia – that he wears so he can be easily spotted.  He also wears a bell when we go out running – so Mummy can track where he is should he go into the undergrowth.  And whenever we let him out in the evenings to run around in the backyard, he wear a LED tag. Not that he has anywhere to run to, but he has been caught trying to scale a wall to catch squirrels!  Because he is just a crazy terrier!

To add to his accessories, George has a Pod Tracker!We were introduced to the Pod, a GPS Tracker a couple of weeks ago when one of our cockapoo owner friends, Jane heard about George and his escapades. She lent us hers to try on George mainly because of the size and it’s light. It is perfect for him and it just goes on the collar. A bit fiddly to get on but it is secure.

This is the App that is on Mummy’s phone.There’s a function called ADVENTURES that she particularly likes – she turns it on when we’re in the park. It tracks George’s movement. He’s a mover!  This was him after our Hyde Park Meet as we were walking back to the car.  Mummy had forgotten to turn it on during the meet – that would have been crazy!!! The whole map would have been filled with zig-zags running for an hour!

And this was from yesterday when he went with Olivia to Battersea, he looked like he covered half of the park!And his top speed was 36.2km/h!!! But I think that includes the time he was in the car coming home! LOL! So not that fast, little George! And those straight lines are rather interesting – how did the car fly over the Thames?!?!?! Maybe the car was too fast for the tracker – GPS took a short-cut?

I’m getting mine next week – we’re trying another tracker that’s way too big for George but good for me.  I’m not a crazy George and Mummy isn’t putting a tracker on me because she doesn’t trust me.  But all it takes is something like a rabbit to set me off running, or just the joy of running and then I get lost. I have lost sight of Mummy a couple of times and thankfully she saw me darting back and forth. But if she didn’t she could rely on a tracker to locate me.

May’s comment:  The Pod is a small and light GPS tracker designed to attach to any pet collar.

This is not an anti-theft device. And it does not replace the need for a microchip. But what it does do – in GPS areas, it can help to locate your dog if it runs off because it was spooked or you simply lost him on a walk.

For my purpose, it is another means to track George when he does one of his infamous escapades. I attach it to George’s collar whenever we’re out for a run in the park. His recall has greatly improved and surprisingly good 90% of the time. But all it takes is something to take him back to that 10% of memory as a stray dog and he’s off! No treats nor threats (not that he understands) can get him back. He will come when he’s ready. And when he does decide to run off and gaze at a tree in another part of the park, having the tracker will at least let me know which direction I should head towards to find him. After that I still have to negotiate when he wants to go home.

At the back of my mind, because he is small, too cute and too sociable for his own good, there is that possibility he could be taken.  Let’s hope I never have to resort to the tracker for that purpose.

But if, in the most unimaginable possibility, that your dog is stolen, for a little while before the “thieves” have figured out there’s a tracker on the dog, you could at least tell which way they went.

I totally trust my dog walker and I don’t use the tracker to see what George is doing. But again, when in doubt, it is also a good way to know where your dogs have been – where they were walked and how much walking.  I have seen dog walkers/nannies “walking” their dogs while they sit on the park bench nattering away with others.

The battery life is also quite impressive. I don’t need to re-charge for a couple of days. There are a few things one can set-up that doesn’t use up the battery life. A safety zone can be set up for the parameters around your home – that way it does not use up battery tracking George. Only when he goes off the safety zone does it actively track his whereabouts.  So in the instance that he is lost and not found immediately, the tracker remains active for at least a couple of days. Of course if it is constantly trying to locate him, the battery will be used up faster.

And what makes it practical too is that there is an extra battery that you can keep charged – so you just have to swap it when the battery runs out.

It is also waterproof, not just shower proof.  As with almost all trackers, they are reliant on good GPS signal.

It is not the end-all and be-all – GPS pet trackers are being developed and improved upon constantly. I tried one two years ago – it was massive and could not track Darcy when she was standing in front of me – to be fair we were in the countryside – as we know have erratic GPS coverage.  Two years on, there are quite a few on the market and the Pod tracker is the first one I’ve tried that is user-friendly and it works.

The technology required has come a long way but it is difficult to put everything we want it to do into something small enough for pets, especially the smaller ones.  But there are now trackers on the market that does work.  The producers will be the first to tell you that there are still glitches and they are continuously working on improving them.

And maybe it can somehow work in correlation with the microchip.