Have Fido or Sparkles Gone Missing? How You Can Find a Lost Dog or Cat With a Doorbell Camera

The platform also uses a large language model (LLM) AI system internally to protect pet parents, validate incoming reports, flag suspicious activity and ensure that the data owners are searching through is trustworthy and safe.

A pet owner can go to the Petco Love Lost site, click the “I Lost a Pet” button and add the specific street address where the pet was lost.

People can also click an “I Found a Pet” button and indicate where the animal was found.

The organization documents pet sightings but doesn’t have video or tracking functionality.

The database pulls from multiple streams, including reports submitted by pet parents and Good Samaritans, intake records from shelters and rescue partners, social media and apps such as Neighbors and Nextdoor.

“We understand what type of data we’re receiving and bucketing it correctly,” says Petco Love chief product officer Aaron Klein. “This dog has a name, we know what cross streets it was lost at, we pull all the key information we have out of the description someone posted … Animals might end up in shelters miles away from where you live.

“[AI] allows us to focus on the five or six or seven animals we think are likely your animal,” Klein says.

Even if your pet isn’t found at first, whenever a new pet is added to the database, a fresh search will be run to see if there’s a match, provided the owner hasn’t given up hope by then.

Miracle search for feline Louis

Sharon Furze, 85, was among the lucky ones. Her two Maine Coon cats, Sundance and Louis, had both escaped her Ridgefield, Washington, house through an unlocked window. In relatively short order, Sundance was found hiding behind a neighbor’s air conditioner, but Louis was nowhere to be seen.

Furze learned about Petco Love Lost through the Humane Society of Southwest Washington. She registered with her email address, uploaded Louis’ picture and listed him as lost.

It took 11 days, but a woman and her partner spotted an animal and searched Google for “Lost pet, orange cat.”

Furze’s Petco Love Lost listing topped Google’s search results. The woman clicked the link and sent a direct message to Furze through Petco Love Lost.

“It was a miracle that we got that cat back,” Furze says, all too aware, considering where he was found, that Louis would have crossed a main highway and, like Lainey, been in areas populated by coyotes.

Pam Kinnett, 78, is also grateful after a Petco Love Lost photo match from a neighbor led to a reunion with her indoor cat Grayson. The cat, which had been missing for more than 90 days, had trekked about a mile from Kinnett’s Plano, Texas, home.

“I am still amazed at Grayson’s journey. He is 12 years old, so not a young kitty,” Kinnett says.

Juliette Gonzalez’s dog, Sandy, went missing after being spooked by a thunderstorm.

“I was very worried and scared for her, especially because she is blind and a senior,” says Gonzalez, 54, who lives in San Antonio. The dog, who had been missing for more than a month, had been taken in by a local organization and placed in a foster home. A photo of Sandy that she posted on Petco Love Lost led to a reunion.

“Sandy is very happy to be back home with our family and playing with her brother,” Gonzalez joyfully reports.

“Knowledge is power; it’s more information,” says Evelyn Ackley, who runs the volunteer arm of the Clifton Animal Shelter in Clifton, New Jersey. Ackley hasn’t directly worked with Ring, but she sees value in using AI and doorbell cameras. “If you can confirm it’s your cat or dog and where [and when] it was seen, it might help you narrow your search radius,” she says.

A privacy lightning rod

Even so, Ackley remains wary of one thing: “As I think about it, most Golden Retrievers, Chihuahuas, Labs and other breeds look very similar. … Can AI tell the difference between my specific dog and any dog from that breed? It would be terrible if it gave people false hope that their pet was found.”

Meanwhile, privacy has become a major lightning rod.

Ring’s Siminoff was forced to play defense after a 30-second TV ad for Search Party ran during the Super Bowl.

Privacy advocates at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation described Ring as a “surveillance nightmare” and decried that the feature is on by default, meaning a person must dig into the app settings to turn it off. In a post on its website, EFF wrote: “In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

U.S. Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts also weighed in. He began a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy by writing, “The American people have sent a clear message in response to Amazon’s Super Bowl commercial seeking to promote the image recognition technology embedded in its Ring doorbells: Get this creepy technology away from our homes.”

Amid the backlash, Ring canceled an impending partnership with Flock Safety, a company close to law enforcement and whose technology can read license plates. According to Ring, since the partnership never launched, no customer videos were ever shared with Flock Safety.

To preserve their privacy, Siminoff says camera owners can decide whether to contact a pet owner after receiving notification of a missing dog. “That ‘Do you want to?’ is really a big part of the invention, because making sure people’s privacy is maintained — and trust — is obviously, for us, a huge thing,” he says. If you say no, it basically nukes and deletes any of that conversation, and nothing happens.... If you say yes, you’re now going to talk to the neighbor and [arrange an interaction].”

Still, Siminoff concedes that “the speed at which technology is moving right now is creating a lot of angst and anxiety. And I think that’s a fair reaction to have. I’m very proud we’ve been able to invent ways that neighbors can come together but also maintain 100 percent of their privacy and security.”

Klein is also mindful of privacy. He says none of your personal information is exposed during Petco Love Lost’s search process, and that the organization takes steps to ensure that the person claiming to have found an animal isn’t a scammer and that the person looking is indeed the rightful owner.

Both parties can chat within Petco Love Lost.

“It feels like Big Brother, but it’s meant [for safety] — we monitor the conversation to make sure no one is trying to take advantage of them,” Klein says. “Our AI model knows the behavior of bots or bad actors and what type of language they use. If we feel like that communication is nefarious, we will then [tell the pet owner], ‘This might be someone you should be wary of, and here’s why.’ ”

Pet owners can provide visual verification to confirm that the missing pet is theirs and not someone else’s. ​

Family priorities

For many, if not most, pet owners, a potential homecoming with a four-legged family member trumps any reservations they may have.

“We’re seeing a lot of people that just want to do the right thing,” Siminoff says. “I haven’t met the person who says, ‘I don’t want to help return a dog to a family.’ But do it in a way that [maintains] privacy and security.”

Ackley agrees that you can’t put a price on a Fluffy or Fido reunion. “As someone who spends most of her time trying to get dogs back home, if it were a program that I could opt into with my Ring camera, I would do it in a hot minute.”