Questions people ask

Go back to where they were last seen and leave somebody there, quiet and still — dogs frequently circle back to the point they got loose. Put your own scent at that spot and only that: an unwashed shirt, a worn pillowcase, something that smells strongly of you. Not their bed or crate blanket. Anything carrying your dog's own scent draws predators as readily as it draws your dog, while human scent lays the same trail home and tends to keep coyotes at a distance. Leave no food out either — it brings in coyotes, raccoons and everything else in the area, and if this ends up needing a trap, an animal that has been fed every night has no reason to walk into one. They will not starve overnight. Write down the exact time and place last seen while it is still fresh, get a flyer out, and file a lost report with every shelter and vet in range. And if you see your dog and they do not come, do not walk at them and do not call out — pursuit is the single most common way a recoverable case becomes a long one. Turn away from them — side-on at the very least — and slowly get down to the ground: take a knee, then sit. Better still, if you can manage it, lie on your back with your head toward the dog and your feet away. Every one of those makes you smaller, lower and less like something advancing on them, and it is what gets a dog in flight mode to close the distance itself.

Make a lost-pet flyer — freeGuide: how to search for a missing dog

A lost-pet search service based in Austin, working across Central Texas, including the Hill Country, that uses thermal drones and ground thermal equipment to find missing animals. It is the only thing we do — not a general drone business that also takes pet work — and every search is flown by the owner. What we sell is a search and the judgment about whether to fly one; we do not take custody of your animal or guarantee a recovery.

No, none of those. We are a paid search service: you have lost your own animal and we go and look for it, usually with a thermal drone at night. We do not house animals, take them in, rehome them, or hold strays, and we have nothing to adopt. If you are trying to surrender or adopt an animal, or you have found a stray, your city or county animal services is where to start — and they are who to call if the animal needs help now. If the pet you are looking for is your own, that is exactly what we do.

Because the call goes better afterward. A useful conversation needs the last known location, the terrain around it, your pet's temperament and what has already been tried — twenty minutes to collect by voice, five to ten typed. If you send it first, we read it before we ring you and we start from what matters.

Typically same day — but the right time of day matters more than raw speed, and we pick that window rather than simply turning up. Thermal reads the contrast between a warm animal and cool ground, and in Texas the ground is still holding the day's heat at sunset; it is coldest, and the contrast best, around sunrise. Size counts as much as timing. A Great Dane is findable at 9pm even a day into the search, where an eight-pound dog in the same situation is not — that one waits for first light, and flying it at sunset would waste your money and our night. Urgency overrides all of it: if your dog was hit by a car at 10pm, we are on site by 11 if we can sort the logistics quickly.

Local searches start at $625 plus mileage. Full detail is on the pricing page — and if a drone is the wrong tool for your situation, we will say so before it costs you anything.

Central Texas, including the Hill Country, worked outward from Austin. Anything inside roughly 150 miles is a local search. Past that it becomes a regional deployment, which carries travel, fuel and often an overnight, and costs accordingly — you will hear that before you commit to anything. Distance is not the only question, though. Dense urban ground is a poor fit whatever the mileage, and open country three hours out can be an excellent one. Send your location with the details and you will get a straight answer on both.

No two of these cases are close enough together to average. A case we take within hours of the animal going missing is a different problem from one we take five days later. An eighteen-year-old chihuahua is not going far; a two-year-old German Shepherd can be a county over by the next morning. A dog that somebody picked up before or during the flight was never going to show up on a camera. A dog on a course of steroids is ravenous, and will bee-line for a dropped french fry six fields away. Package all of that into one number and it describes none of them — least of all yours, which is the only case you actually care about.

Which is why such a number would say more about which cases a company takes than about how well it works. We could raise ours tomorrow by accepting only large dogs lost within the hour on open ground, and turning away the small one three days into the woods — and that second animal is the one that most needs somebody doing this properly. We could also count every case that ended happily, whether or not the search is what did it. We aren't willing to do either, which is why there is no figure here to give you.

There's also the question of what such a number would even be about. A drone doesn't replace searching, it multiplies it — in how much ground gets covered, and in how well that ground gets looked at. Asking its success rate on its own is a little like asking a flashlight's, or a helicopter's, or a search dog's. On some cases the right move is a trap rather than a flight. And we are sometimes hired specifically to rule an area out — to settle whether the animal is in the greenbelt behind the house, so the search can move elsewhere. On that job, finding nothing is precisely what was bought.

The comparison you're reaching for is a professional search against doing it yourself. That one is real, and it turns on ground covered and on seeing what eyes walk past — not on a percentage anyone can quote you.

Underneath all of it: nobody can sell you a found animal. Not us, not anyone. What you're hiring is somebody who flies searches for lost pets and nothing else, a thermal camera that sees what a flashlight cannot, and the judgement about which tool your case actually needs.

How the service works, step by step

Because of the ground you cannot walk. A thermal drone covers creek beds, greenbelt, pasture, brush and wooded acreage far faster than a search party, and it sees into treelines and undergrowth that people walk straight past. The thermal part matters more than the flying part: an optical camera is looking for an animal that spent millions of years evolving to not be seen, while a thermal camera is looking for warmth, which nothing has evolved a way to hide. That is the whole advantage, and it is why a drone without thermal is close to useless for this.

Guide: what makes an aerial search work

Dogs, primarily — that is what the company was built for. Livestock is genuinely easy by comparison and we have found horses and bulls, which stand out on thermal like streetlights. Cats are the hard case: their behavior suits an aerial search poorly, because they hide under structures and in cover where nothing above them has a line of sight. Ground thermal is much better suited to cats, though it needs the search area narrowed first. Ask, and we will tell you honestly whether your case is one worth flying. We have also once found a kangaroo.

Missing horse or cattle: what to do first

Because the risks of waiting compound while the reasons to wait do not. Plenty of dogs come home on their own and we will not pretend otherwise — some owners who booked a search would have had their dog back anyway. But every day out, the ground your animal could be on grows in every direction at once, so the area to cover climbs far faster than the days do. A search that is one evening's work in the first few days may not be flyable at all two weeks later. Meanwhile there is traffic, there are predators, there is heat and cold, and there is a behavioral clock: the longer a dog stays in survival mode the deeper it sets, until it is wary of strangers and eventually of you. Past that point it stops being a search and becomes a trapping operation.

What the equipment cannot do

Far more than a person on foot, and that is the real argument for it. A methodical thermal sweep covers acreage in an evening that a ground team would need days to walk — and it sees into brush and treelines that a ground team walks straight past.

Probably not, and it is worth saying so plainly. If you already know roughly where your dog is, a flight mostly confirms what you know. What that case wants is a trapping plan run with patience over days or weeks — feeding station, camera, then a trap once the routine is established — and that is the province of an organization that traps full time rather than of us. Chasing or calling at that stage is the single quickest way to undo two weeks of progress.

We trap dogs and cats, on a best-effort basis, and we carry traps in a range of sizes for them. We do not trap livestock at all — there is no trap for a horse, a cow or a hog, and loose stock comes home through containment, feed and an open gate rather than through equipment. On the animals we do trap, the honest framing is that we are thermal drone operators first and trappers second: a dedicated trapper or a trapping organization is considerably more experienced and more capable at this than we are, and on a hard animal that difference matters. What we do is spot-trapping — once your animal is located and we understand its direction of travel and its habits, a trap goes in along that line, and where we have eyes on it we will usually attempt it. In most cases that has worked. What we cannot do is run a trapping campaign for two weeks, and some animals need exactly that. If your animal has not trapped inside our window we will tell you, and refer you on where we have somebody in your area to refer you to.

A thermal camera does not use light. It reads heat, so darkness makes no difference to it at all — this is not a camera straining to see in the dark, it is an instrument that never needed light in the first place. What matters is not the light but the sun. While the sun is up it loads energy into rock, road, soil and brush, and those surfaces then read hotter than the animal you are looking for, which is why we do not fly in daylight in any season. Once the ground has given that heat back, a warm animal stands out clearly against it, and the best conditions are usually the hours before sunrise.

No — and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Thermal does not see through matter: a leaf or a branch stops it exactly as it stops your eyes. That is where most explanations stop, which is why people assume tree cover defeats the whole idea. It does not, for three reasons. First, we do not need to see the whole animal. A gap in the canopy the size of a dinner plate is enough for a heat signature underneath it to register — we are not looking for a dog-shaped outline, we are looking for warmth where the ground should be cool, and a fragment of that is enough to know something living is down there. Second, we are working in three dimensions: altitude and angle are both ours to choose, and moving either opens an entirely different set of sightlines through the same canopy. In close to every case some combination of the two finds a clear line to the heat source. Third, once we have a signature we confirm it rather than guess — the spotlights go on and the zoom camera comes up, close enough to read a book held in your hand from a hundred feet away, and we identify the animal. Together that gives near-total ground coverage even under heavy cover, which is why heavily wooded ground is not a marginal case for us. It is one of the most useful things we do.

More than most people realize, and it is worth asking any operator about — not only us. The ground is coldest in the hours before sunrise, so that is when the contrast between a warm animal and cool earth is at its best. An evening flight is working against heat the ground has been soaking up all day. Both can work. They are not equivalent. Some operators only fly evenings because evenings suit them, and sometimes that is genuinely the right call — if your dog went missing an hour ago, or it is a big dog putting out plenty of heat, getting there sooner beats waiting for a better thermal window. But if an operator cannot accommodate an early-morning search at all, ask why, and whether the answer is about your animal or about their schedule. What you should expect from anyone you hire is that they lay out the trade-off for your specific case — how long it has been, how big the animal is, what the terrain and the weather are doing — and settle it with you rather than for you.

Because a consumer drone has no thermal camera, no spotlight, and an optical camera that cannot resolve a dog in an open field from altitude — let alone one lying in cover at dusk. Animals evolved to hide from eyes and are very good at it; none of them evolved any way to hide heat, which is the entire reason this works. Beyond the aircraft, reading the imagery is its own skill, and a dog located at 2am in survival mode is not recovered by walking up to it — that is how it ends up three miles further out.

It depends almost entirely on how long it has been. Inside the first seventy-two hours a dog has usually not gone far, so the ground around the last-seen point is the ground worth searching — that is a thermal problem, it is the window a drone works best in, and it is normally what we would tell you to book. Once days have passed and there is no defined search area left, the useful question changes: what you need first is a direction of travel and some idea of where the animal settled, and that is what a tracking dog can give you. The trail is older and harder by then, which is the trade you are making. Tell us the specifics and we will give you a straight opinion, including when the answer is that we are not the right call.

Scent dog or thermal drone: the full comparison

Yes, and they are not really alternatives — they solve different problems. A scent dog gives you a search area: a direction of travel from the last-seen point, and some indication of where the animal settled. A drone searches that area. In that order they work well together, and we are happy to work alongside a K9 team — we do it regularly and refer in both directions.

Scent dog or thermal drone: the full comparison

No. There is no licensing body and no register — it is a description of the work rather than a credential, and it is used by people ranging from full-time recovery specialists to somebody who has read a few articles. That cuts both ways, so judge it on what the person can specifically do rather than on the title: behavior knowledge, scent capability, trapping, and whether they can see into the terrain your dog is in.

What a pet detective actually does

Only if your dog was already wearing one when it got loose. A GPS tag is a superb thing to own and a useless thing to buy tonight — it has to be on the collar before the dog goes, not after. If yours has no tag, put that on the list for when this is over and let it go for now; nothing you order today will arrive in time to matter.

Fi GPS collars (referral link) ↗ (opens in a new tab)"Dog tracker" means three different things

Yes — in the same way your neighbor or your aunt can. Pet psychics are right some of the time, and not rarely: we have worked cases where the owner had also had a reading, and the reading told them very nearly exactly what we had told them. We are not psychic. The plain explanation is that lost animals behave predictably — a frightened dog follows the path of least resistance, holes up in thick cover through the day, moves at dawn and dusk, and very often works its way back toward the place it got loose. Anyone who has worked enough of these — rescue people, trackers, experienced volunteers, and yes, some psychics — converges on the same advice, because the same advice is what the behavior implies. Overlap between a reading and a rescue plan is not evidence of a gift; it is evidence that two people noticed the same pattern. What a reading cannot give you is anything you can check — and the area it points at still has to be searched, which is the part we do.

The honest position on pet psychics

Tell us as soon as you know and we will stand down. The terms of service set the policy that governs: for local searches, 75% refundable more than five hours out, 50% between two and five hours, and non-refundable inside two hours or once we have started traveling. In practice we are usually more forgiving than that, often returning everything but the card fees — around 6%, because the processor charges once to take the payment and again to send it back. Where the policy does get applied is when your booking cost another family a slot, when we are already on the road, or on a regional mission where lodging, kennelling for our own dogs and a vehicle are already paid for.

No. In Texas a stolen animal is stolen property, and investigating the theft of property is licensed private-investigator work. We are not licensed investigators, we do not run surveillance, and we do not perform any law-enforcement function — that is not us declining to sell you something, it is something we are not permitted to provide. Our work is animals lost out in the open. If you believe yours was taken, the right first calls are the police and, if you want it worked privately, a licensed investigator.

Yes. Airspace is regulated by the FAA and it is not owned by the landowner beneath it, so an aircraft overhead is not trespassing — and the law does not distinguish between crewed and uncrewed aircraft. Every flight here is under an FAA Part 107 certificate and a registered aircraft, and if you ever believe a pilot is operating unlawfully, the right response is to call local law enforcement rather than to intervene yourself.

We have no idea, and that is the honest answer. It could be a survey crew, a roof or insurance inspection, a real estate photographer, a utility line check, a hobbyist, or a police or fire aircraft. What is true of very nearly all of them is that it is doing something with no connection to you, it does not know you exist, and from the altitude it is working at it cannot resolve you — you are a few pixels, if that.

If it happens to be us, it is a search for somebody's missing animal, usually in the hours before dawn because that is when thermal works. We fly the thermal camera rather than the optical one; it cannot make out a face or see through a window, and there is nothing on it to be interested in but a warm four-legged shape on cold ground. If you would like to know whether it is us, ring the number on this site and you will get a person.

No, and please do not. A drone is an aircraft in federal airspace, and interfering with one carries criminal exposure that is far more serious than most people expect. Beyond that: firing into the air is dangerous in itself, anything brought down falls on somebody, and the battery packs can burn. If a flight is bothering you, call us or call the police — both of those end better for everyone than the alternative.