animal rights

This week, Slate is reviewing all the “smart” gizmos we can get our hands on. Read all the entries here.

 

For the past two weeks, I have had a smart dog. I don’t mean a brilliant one, although Ziggy is of course a genius, but a dog that is synced up with my smartphone. This weird-but-true arrangement—a furry elaboration on the Internet of Things—comes courtesy of Whistle, a startup that caters to tech-savvy (and/or obsessive) pet owners with its motion tracker and accompanying app.

The Whistle monitor (available for $99.95 here) is a stainless steel disc embedded with an accelerometer that fits onto your dog’s collar. It weighs about half an ounce. As your dog plays, walks, or sleeps, the device records his activity and sends it via your Wi-Fi connection to your phone. Using the free Whistle app, you can then watch your dog’s day unspool in a blue line that spikes when he moves around. You can even upload comments and photos, visible to as many as four other people who’ve downloaded the app. If you’re feeling competitive, pressing a button on your screen produces a rainbow of charts that compare your dog’s activity and rest levels to those of similarly sized dogs in Whistle’s database. The sensor itself needs charging every five days or so. For an extra $20, you may have it engraved.

My task was to test out Whistle on a dog, any dog, and I was lucky to have one on call. Ziggy lives with my parents, not too far from me. I registered my mom and me as Ziggy’s owners and downloaded the app to both of our phones. (My dad, who accompanies Ziggy on his evening constitutionals, declined to participate. “I’m under enough pressure,” he said.) We also registered Jake, the dog walker, who thankfully felt intrigued rather than spied on.