Toss Treats, Talk to Your Dog, & Ease Anxiety w/ This Awesome Gadget!

A friend of mine got a new puppy not too long ago, and while he’s pretty damn cute, he’s also a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, which apparently is another name for “I’m a breed with separation anxiety and just want to sit on laps and stop you from doing anything besides loving me”.

Soon as she would leave her apartment, the barking and howling would begin, then came the calls from the neighbors followed by the mental anguish of always wondering if he was barking when she wasn’t home.

When she mentioned all of this to me, I was reminded of a product that I had seen not too long ago and wondered if it could maybe help.

The device is called a Furbo Dog Camera and essentially it’s a camera for, well, monitoring your dog. And while that sounds like a web-camera basically (which you could obviously get a cheap one for a lot cheaper than the Furbo), it has a few other features that make it a lot more functional than that.

Check out Oliver’s Instagram here!

Check out the Furbo here.

Set It Up

First though, setup was easy. You simply take it out of the box, plug it in and open the Furbo app on your iPhone or Android device.

Then you select connect to it from the app, once it finds it it’ll ask you for your wifi network and password and once you put that in, it’s basically all set. Just make sure to put it in a place where your dog can easily get to or another important place that they might hang out.

The Features

So besides being super easy to setup and not requiring a separate computer like most webcams would, the Furbo has a decent suite of features that make it specialized for doggy monitoring.

It has a 720P 120 degree wide angle lens that also has an infrared LED night mode and can be accessed from the Furbo app on your phone anywhere you have data signal.

You can zoom in on the live video to get closer to the pup (and make sure that thing they’re chewing is a toy and not your shoe) and even tap a button to record photos or videos (that OF COURSE you can share with EVERYONE).

It also has 2 way audio which means not only can you hear the dog, but you can also talk back to the dog and revel in the face they make in the confusion of your voice coming out of this tiny foreign tower.

Also on the audio front, it has bark monitoring. You can set up the sensitivity in the app but once you dial it in, it can send you a notification whenever your dog starts to get a little vocal.

It even has the ability for you to tap a button and it’ll launch out a treat. It comes with a few to try it with, but it’ll accept any treat that’s round shaped and less than a centimeter in diameter.

Are we starting to see how this thing can help with the anxious dog?

How it Helps With Your Dog’s Anxiety

When my friend now leaves her apartment, the dog eventually barks, but now when that happens she gets a quick notification letting her know that it’s happening.

She taps it and it opens up the camera where she can then see the pup having his normal “I’ve been clearly abandoned and left here to die” reaction and she can tap the button to speak to him and calm him down.

And if needed, even toss him a treat. And, you know, it’s worked really well for her. Shortly after he hears her voice and definitely after he gets a treat while hearing her voice, he curls back up on his dog bed and decides that clearly he’s freaking out for now reason. Why a small robot looking device with his owner’s voice mysteriously coming out of it and then feeding him works, I don’t know, but it does.

Cool, right? You can check out the Furbo here and if you get one, definitely let me know how it goes in the comments below!

Check out Oliver’s Instagram here!