Tagg the Pet Tracker

There are few things more valuable to pet owners than the safety and well being of their furry companions. That's why Tagg the Pet Tracker ($99.95 direct, plus $7.95/month) seems like an indispensible gadget for pet lovers. If you can handle the up-front price and recurring service costs, the Tagg adds peace of mind with its GPS-enabled tracking service, as well as a nifty way to make sure your pets are getting enough exercise throughout the day.?

Design, Setup, and Service Plans
The Tagg Tracker looks a lot like a modern bark collar or electric fence collar, with a discrete white and grey body that measures 1.49 by 3.18 by 0.77 inches and weighs 1.16 ounces. It's relatively unobtrusive for medium to large sized dogs, like the labradoodle I tested with, but might be a bit unwieldy with smaller breeds. While I tested on a dog, you can use the Tagg on cats and any other large pets you'd like to keep tabs on. It feels sturdily built, with a water-resistant build that can withstand bath time, but don't expect it to hold up under water for long periods. There's a single large button on the front face of the Tagg, which controls power and tracking modes, with an LED indicator light below. The Tagg Tracker clips onto collars using the included collar clip, and comes with a docking station for charging and software updates. ?

Setup takes place online, and all you have to do with the Tagg is place it on the docking station for a charge and software update. You have to register your Tagg Tracker's serial number (found on the bottom), enter billing information, register your pet (name, breed, weight, etc.), set up alerts, and designate your home tracking zone (more on that later). The whole process takes about 20 minutes, and you'll be able to adjust any settings later.

For $99.95 you get the Tagg Tracker, docking station, collar clip, and 90 days of tracking service. After the initial three months, you'll automatically be billed $7.95 per month until you cancel your service. You can also add more pets with individual trackers for $89.95 apiece and an additional $0.95 per month per pet.

Location and Activity Tracking
With a recent update, the Tagg Tracker now serves a dual purpose?not only keeping tabs on your pet's location, but also his activity level. During initial setup, you should have designated a home zone, which can be stretched to cover a single city block or your entire neighborhood. You also choose whether you want alerts sent via text, email, or both, and if you want to add other contacts to your alert network. If your pet strays outside of the designated home zone, you'll receive a notification that shows your pets location on a map, gives you an approximate street address, and displays an option to trigger tracking mode. Tracking mode pings the Tagg Tracker every 3 minutes for 30 minutes, sending you an alert of your pet's approximate location?perfect for tracking down a pet on the move. If you know you'll be leaving the home zone, simply press the button on the Tagg Tracker twice to enable trip mode. The LED will blink blue three times, and you'll have 15 minutes before regular tracking is re-enabled. You can restart trip mode multiple times if your trip lasts longer than 15 minutes, but I wish there was an option to adjust the length of trips. Alternatively, you can hold the power button to turn Tagg off, but this isn't recommended.?

Activity tracking uses the built-in accelerometer to determine how active your pet has been throughout the course of the day?think of it as a FitBit ?or a Nike+ Fuel Band?for your pet. Much like Nike, Tagg has its own system of quantifying activity, whittling down fetching, climbing stairs, napping, and everything in between, into Tagg Points. You can set a daily goal on the Tagg website, and get real-time updates throughout the day. Tagg Points are broken down into resting, lightly active, moderately active, and highly active, with a basic guide as to how many points your dog should be getting, based on breed activity level. This is actually my favorite feature, as I could see activity plotted along a timeline, giving me a good idea of what triggered the most activity and when.?I tested the Tagg on a dog, but it's designed for use with cats or any other large pet you'd like to keep tabs on.?

My test subject was a one-and-a-half year-old male Labradoodle named Thornton. He's incredibly well behaved, but he's still a puppy at heart and I wouldn't put bolting out of an unattended door past him. He's also very lean and active, so I was curious to see just how well he'd fare in Tagg points. I had some concerns about the comfort of the Tagg Tracker on his collar, but he never seemed to mind, whether he was running about or sprawled out in bed.

After setting up the designated home zone, three city blocks in my case, I took Thornton for a walk around the neighborhood. I deliberately took him outside of the home zone to test how accurate the Tagg Tracker was, and how timely the alerts were. Within about three minutes of exiting the home zone, I received a text and email alert with a surprisingly accurate location?it knew the exact street corner I was standing on. The alert read: "I'm Outside the Home Tagg Zone" and gave me the time and approximate street address, with an option to enable tracking mode. I enabled tracking mode to get an idea of how quick and accurate the results were. I received an alert every three minutes and, aside from one inaccurate location, I had a very good idea of the path Thornton was on. When I returned to the home zone, I received an alert that read: "It's good to be back in my Tagg zone!"

Trip mode works as advertised, but I found myself forgetting to enable it on short errands I'd run throughout the day, and I think the 15-minute time frame is a bit short. The alerts aren't a huge nuisance, though, and remembering to enable Trip mode will likely become part of your routine if you use the Tagg everyday.

Activity tracking worked equally as well, with a detailed view of just how much exercise Thornton was getting. Tagg designates Labrador Retreivers as Medium Energy dogs, with a target of 225-350 Tagg points in a day. At 9 a.m., when I took Thornton for his morning walk, activity levels spiked from resting to moderately active, then leveled back out to lightly active when we sat down to watch some TV. I took Thornton to the dog park at 3 p.m. and saw activity levels spike to highly active, then level back out to simply resting status when we got back. All told, Thornton racked up 353 Tagg points that day, with 4 hours and 24 minutes of total time active, and I had a pretty good time keeping tabs on his activity throughout the day.

All location and activity data is transmitted wirelessly from the Tagg Tracker, so you'll only really need to dock the Tagg to charge. The built-in battery is rated at up to 30 days of use, and will send you an alert when it's time to charge. There's also free iOS and Android apps, which you can use to track your pet's location, but activity tracking is only accessible via the website.

Conclusions
If you live in an urban setting where your dog is almost always either inside or on a leash, the Tagg probably isn't a necessity. But for suburban or rural homes, where you let your dog roam around parks and backyards, the Tagg could be an invaluable safety net should your pet decide to stray too far from home. The Tagg's activity tracking feature is also really well implemented and fun to use, and will likely help encourage you to keep your pets in tip-top shape. For simple tracking, the closest thing we've tested is the Garmin GTU 10, an all-purpose GPS device that's designed for people, pets, and valuables. You get a similar geo-fence feature that alerts you when the GTU 10 exits a designated zone, but it lacks the activity tracking features of the Tagg. It's also $199 with a $50/year service fee. At $99.95 up front and $7.95 per month, the Tagg Tracker is a bit pricey, but really, you can't put a price on the safety and well-being of your pets.

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