DO NOT put an Apple Airtag on your pet

I am going to go off script a bit - we are not talking tech strategy today. All I could find online were articles about putting AirTags on your pets. Even as recent as two days ago there was an article in the NY Times about this. I could not find one article talking about the pitfalls of using them on pets.

Let me start by saying - when I first piblished this article we were still searching for our buddy. She got away from us 6 days before I published this article and I thought we were being so smart by putting an AirTag on her collar.

Let me not mince words - it is not smart! Our buddy was lost in a pretty populated area and we started getting pings on her location all over the place - most of which did not make sense.

There are three main reasons these do not work on pets, or other things that move.

First, and iPhone has to be really close to the AirTag for a ping to register. Apole does not publish distances which i would imagine makes most people assume (as I did) that they covered a pretty far distance. They do not - it is about 30 ft to be exact. Even in a more densely populated area with lots of iPhones it is pretty easy for a dog to stay 30 feet away from people, and they usually will as they are in survival mode.

Second, there was often a random delay when her AirTag ping. Sometimes we would get a notification and it would say found now. More often though, we would get a notification and when we looked in the find my app it would state something like - 24 minutes ago!!!! Why didn’t it tell us when it pinged - who knows.

E.g. at one point I was pinged that she was with me in the woods I was searching in, and then a ping immediately after that she was a quarter mile down the road. Come to find out the “with me“ ping was delayed and it never told me on the spot when she was within 30 ft of me.

At one point we wondered if cars traveling at higher speeds were picking up her tag and throwing it farther away than where she was as they were all over the place which was super unreliable and frustrating.

Third, is the safety feature Apple implemented as a security measure, which is explained here. We were able to catch our pup on an Arlo camera at a feeding station at one point, and heard this high pitched chirping noise. We were thinking “what the heck is that”. Well, AirTags randomly beep on and off when separated from its owners iPhone. So, close your eyes for a moment. Imagine your pup running for her life or hiding somewhere, and randomly out of no where, the chip attached to her collar starts randomly beeping at a very high pitch. Guessing that didn’t help our cause!

I love my AirTags on our keys however after 6 days of being jerked around by random nonsensical pings, I hate them on pets!

Apple specifically recommends you do not use them on pets - however that has not stopped anyone from writing articles on how great they are for pets, and building collars specifically for AirTags. We even had someone comment on one of our lost pets posts on Facebook that “when we get her back we should put an AirTag on her collar so we can find her easily”. We found that one a bit comical. I am living proof that Apple is right - don’t do it.

If this post stops one person from putting these on their pet it is worth it!!

Please buy them for your keys, they are awesome - but DO NOT use them for your pets (or anything else that moves).

We ultimately found our buddy 7.5 days after she was lost. The AirTag was a blessing and a curse. Over the course of those 7.5 days, I believe we had 8 to 10 pings in total. It was good in that at a macro level it helped us understand her movement to a point - but could not be relied on to track her at a more detailed level.