By Megan Navarro HAYS COUNTY — The Hays County Pet Resource Center is hoping to make the reunification process between pets and their owners a little easier by partnering with Neighbors by Ring, a public safety mobile app to share hyperlocal updates with Ring camera users within the county.
According to its website, Ring aims to connect residents with public agencies through the Neighbors App to create more informed communities. The app has helped neighbors through various ways, including reports made of a package thief targeting homes in Dallas, which led to an arrest and hundreds of packages found in the thief’s home, and keeping communities in California informed and connected with realtime updates during a wildfire.
Neighbors can help neighbors reunite pets with their owners and get them safely back home by using the lost and found pet information feature of the app, which is the sole focus of the partnership with the Hays County Pet Resource Center. This is important because it helps keep the pets from entering the shelter system, which has said. “It's really important because we know that our shelter is overcrowded.
If we can give the community resources, if we can all work together as neighbors to reunite lost pets, then that's a burden that doesn't have to be placed on the shelter.”
Having another tool to use that has been proven to be effective in the circumstance that a beloved pet gets lost also helps bring the owners peace of mind, Shenefiel said.
“I think the key to what makes it so different, both for local residents and for the pet resource center, is that ability to really focus your audience. Certainly, lots of pets are already shared on shelter websites. They're already shared on social media, but there's no way to send that information to the audience that it's most relevant to,” Shenefiel explained.
“The big difference with this is the ability to communicate directly with the neighborhood where that pet was either lost from or found and there's no other tool to be able to do that easily.”
Another step to simplify the pet reunification process is Ring’s Pet Profiles, which allows customers to share images of their pet through a Neighbors Pet Profile or lost pet post with Petco Love Lost. From there, the database’s pet image technology will check all affiliated shelters and private found-pet reports to see if there are any pets matching the images provided.
With most lost pets being less than 1 mile from home, swift action and community effort are critical in reuniting pets with their loved ones, according to the Hays County Pet Resource Center; this is possible by leveraging modern technology and sharing lost pets to the Neighbors by Ring app to make the community safer.
To learn more about Neighbors by Ring, visit bit.ly/3T5UAVK.
already been witnessing overcrowding, said Executive Advisor and Project Coordinator Lee Ann Shenefiel.
“The [San Marcos Regional Animal] Shelter is full of pets who have families looking for them or who loved them at some point and, for whatever reason, they either aren't finding them at the shelter or they can't make the time. You can live in Hays County and it could be 30 or 40 minutes to get to the shelter. So, if folks who find pets have a way to communicate with their neighbors close to them, they have an opportunity to help reunite that pet without taking them to the shelter,” Shenefiel
