Your Stock Are Out. Here's What to Do First.
Start at the fence line — the gap tells you which way they went, and direction is most of the search. When walking it stops working, we fly thermal after dark across Central Texas. Tell us what got out and where, and you will get a straight read tonight.
Start at the fence line
If they are gone and you do not yet know where they got out, that is the first job and it is worth more than anything else you could be doing right now.
Stock leave through a specific place, and they generally leave in the direction they were already facing. A gate off the latch, a section down after a storm, a tree on the wire, a low spot the ground washed out from under. Finding that gap turns a whole property and everything around it into an arc — and an arc is a search, where a property is a guess.
The rest of the first hour is on the list below. Most of it costs nothing.
First, before anything else
Most of this costs nothing, all of it helps, and the first hour matters more for stock than people expect — not because they are hard to find, but because of where they can get to.
Walk the fence line and find where they got out
The gap tells you the direction, and direction is most of the search. A gate left off the latch, a downed section after a storm, a tree on the wire, a low spot where the ground washed out. Stock leave through a specific place and they generally leave in the direction they were already facing. Knowing the gap turns a whole property into an arc.
Call the sheriff's non-emergency line if there is any road nearby
Loose stock on a public road is a public-safety matter and, in Texas, potentially a liability one. Reporting it early does two things: it gets a deputy looking, and it puts the time you reported it on the record. This is the step that is genuinely different from a lost dog, and it is the one people skip.
Ring the neighbours whose land adjoins yours — and ask them to walk their fence line, not to keep an eye out
The specific ask matters, exactly as it does with a lost cat. "Let me know if you see her" produces nothing, because loose stock that has settled is standing still in a corner of somebody's back pasture where nobody is looking. "Would you drive or walk your fence line and your back pasture this evening" produces animals. Adjoining land is where most of them are.
Put feed and water at the gap they left from, and open the gate
A horse or a cow that has had enough of being out will come back to the place it knows, and the thing that brings it the last quarter mile is feed it recognises — a bucket rattled, a hay bale, its own trough moved to the gap. Leave the gate open into a small holding pen rather than the whole property, so an animal that comes back at two in the morning is contained rather than loose again by dawn.
Do not chase, and do not push them with a vehicle
This is the one that costs people their animal. Stock that are driven move fast, move far, and go through fences they would otherwise respect. A horse pushed at dusk can put five miles and three properties between itself and home before it stops. If you find them, stop, let them settle, and bring feed to them — the recovery is nearly always slower and quieter than the instinct says.
Write down the time and the place last seen
The exact hour and the exact gap. Everything about where an animal can be by tonight is calculated from those two facts, and a guess at either widens the area we have to fly by a great deal more than it feels like it should.
When walking the fence line stops working
There is a point, usually somewhere after dark on the first night, where the useful things run out. You have found the gap, you have rung the neighbours, the feed is at the gate, and the animal is somewhere in several hundred acres of ground you cannot see into from any road.
That is the problem a thermal camera is actually good at, and livestock is the easiest version of it.
Thermal reads heat rather than shapes. A living animal is warmer than the ground around it, and once the sun is off that ground the difference is stark. Size is what turns that from a technique into an easy case: a 1,200lb animal radiates far more than a terrier, so it registers from a higher altitude, and altitude is ground covered. On most rural flights, horses and cattle are the first things on the screen — including on flights that were looking for something else entirely.
Three other things work in your favour, and none of them apply to a lost cat. Stock cannot fit into the enclosed places that defeat a small-animal search; there is no crawlspace or culvert for a horse. They bed down in the open rather than wedging themselves out of sight. And they are on pasture and ranchland, which is the cool, open terrain this camera was built for. A lost dog in a suburban greenbelt is a harder problem than a missing horse on four hundred acres.
What it does not do is see through a roof. An animal that has walked into a barn, a run-in shed or a loading pen is invisible to it, whatever the animal weighs — and that is worth checking before anyone flies anything.
When a thermal search works best
Thermal finds an animal by the difference between its body heat and the ground behind it. That difference is widest when the ground is coldest, which makes the hour of the flight matter more than almost anything else about a search.
MidnightMidnight
- DogsUp and moving from an hour before sunrise until about three hours after, and again from sunset for about four hours.
- CatsEssentially nocturnal. Out from around midnight until about 7am.
Where a stripe sits over the green is when to search for that animal. The evening stripe for dogs is the one worth looking at twice: they are moving, and the ground is still too warm to see them against — which is the whole reason a dusk search disappoints. The same dog before dawn is moving over ground at its coldest, and the cat window covers most of that stretch too.
- DaytimeRuled out twice over, which is why it is most of the bar. Sun-loaded rock, road and brush read hotter than the animal, so there is nothing for the camera to separate — and dogs and cats have both settled somewhere out of sight by now, so there would be little moving to find even if it could see. One exception, and it is a real one: under fully overcast sky nothing is being sun-loaded and the ground stays near air temperature, which can make a daytime flight workable. Workable, not good — and it has to be the whole sky, because broken cloud leaves the sunlit patches hotter than anything you are looking for.
- SunsetThe worst conditions in the whole flyable window. The ground has been absorbing heat since morning and is still giving it back, so there is very little between an animal and what it is standing on. Through a Texas summer we do not recommend this window at all, and will say so — the exception is an animal in imminent danger, where getting eyes up sooner is worth more than getting a better picture later.
- 3 hours after sunsetThe one place on the bar where the two arguments disagree. Enough of the day's heat has finally left the ground for an animal to separate from it — but the timing is wrong for both: the dog window is closing, and cats will not be up for another couple of hours. Good conditions over a quiet field find nothing.
- Late nightThe cat window. Cats are essentially nocturnal, so this is when one is up and moving rather than tucked somewhere out of sight — and the ground is cold enough by now to show an animal that holds far less heat than a dog.
- The hour before sunriseThe best conditions available. The ground is at its coldest of the whole cycle, and dogs and cats both stand out sharply.
- SunriseStill excellent. The ground keeps its overnight cold for a while after the sun is up, which is why the good window runs past dawn rather than ending at it.
- 3 hours after sunriseThe ground is loading with heat again and the contrast collapses quickly. Past this we stop.
Which livestock cases are findable
Thermal works well when
- The animal is out on pasture, hay meadow, ranchland or a hunting lease — open ground is the terrain this camera handles best, and it is where most stock end up
- It is a large-bodied animal: a horse, a cow, a bull. Mass means retained heat, and a 1,200lb animal reads from an altitude where a terrier would not
- Several head are out together. A group is a brighter, larger and more obvious target than one animal, and stock that scatter usually regroup
- There is fence line, road, creek or treeline to work along. Loose stock follow lines rather than wandering at random, which turns a search into a route rather than a grid
Thermal cannot work when
- The animal has gone into a barn, a run-in shed, a loading pen or under a metal roof — a roof between the camera and the animal ends the flight, whatever the animal weighs
- The ground is dense cedar brake or heavy unbroken canopy, where the ceiling closes over the animal entirely
- It is the middle of a hot afternoon. Ground that has been in the sun all day gives back as much heat as the animal does, and the contrast the camera needs is not there yet
- The stock are small and young — kid goats, lambs, poultry — against warm ground. Size is what buys the altitude, and without it the signature is lost
Which animals this works for
Dogs are what this tool is best at. A lost dog is usually out on the ground and moving, and dusk and dawn are exactly when they tend to be up and meandering rather than bedded down — which is also when the ground has given up its heat and a warm body stands out most sharply. Treelines, greenbelt, brush and pasture all read well from above.
Livestock hold a great deal of heat and behave predictably. Cattle and horses move as a group, follow fence lines, and settle in places that can be reasoned about rather than guessed at. Size and predictability together make them among the easiest animals to pick up from the air, and ranchland is the terrain thermal handles best.
Cats are the least suited of the animals we fly for, and we would rather say so before you spend anything. Some do climb, and a cat on a roofline, up a tree or out in the woods is genuinely findable. Many do not. A frightened cat's instinct is to compress into the smallest enclosed space it can reach, usually within a few hundred feet — under a deck, inside a shed, beneath a parked car — and thermal cannot see through any of that. Some owners hear the odds and want every tool tried anyway. That is a legitimate reason to fly and we will not talk you out of it twice. But you should hear the odds first.
For anything else — goats, pigs, poultry, tortoises, an escaped exotic — the question is always the same: what does this animal do when it is loose and frightened? One that keeps moving across open ground is findable. One that goes to ground, wedges itself into cover, or is small enough to disappear against a warm background usually is not. Tell us the species and what it did, and you will get a straight read before anyone commits to a flight.
In remote country, the other methods are not options
Almost all lost-dog advice quietly assumes people. A flyer works because somebody drives past and reads it. A neighborhood post works because somebody in the neighborhood looks out of a window. A sighting reaches you because there was a person standing there to do the sighting.
Take the people away and every one of those goes to zero. Ranchland, greenbelt, creek bottom, cedar brake, an open field three miles from the nearest road — nobody is walking through it, nobody is going to happen across your dog, and there is no one for a flyer to reach. You can post to every lost-pet group in the county and it will not put a single pair of eyes on the ground your dog is actually on.
That is also where the danger is worst. Cover is thick enough to hide an animal completely, there are no fences or buildings bounding how far it can travel, and there is nothing manmade to shelter in — no porch, no shed, no garage, none of the places a dog in town would end up. Predation risk peaks exactly where the chance of a person spotting your dog bottoms out.
Wooded ground is the hardest terrain there is to search by any method, and it is the terrain a drone is best suited to, because altitude is the only way to get a look at ground nobody is walking on. In open field and remote country a drone is not the better tool. It is the only one that puts eyes on the area at all.
Waiting is a bet, and the odds only get worse
Almost everyone asks some version of this: should I give it a few more days and see whether he comes home on his own?
It is a fair question and we will not pretend otherwise. Plenty of dogs do come back by themselves, and some owners who booked a search would have had their dog back anyway. That is real money spent on an outcome that was already coming.
But the other side of the bet is steeper than it looks. Every day that passes, the ground your dog could be on grows — and it 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. Someone told us recently they would get in touch if the dog was not home in three weeks. By then there is nothing left to fly.
And the search getting harder is not the worst of it. Every day out is another day for something to happen: traffic, predators — small dogs especially — rattlesnakes, heat and cold, an injury that leaves them unable to move. People cut both ways. Some dogs get picked up and kept, and far more get chased by well-meaning strangers who only push them further out. Where we fly, a dog running among livestock can be shot by a rancher acting within their rights.
There is a behavioral clock running too. The longer a dog stays in survival mode, the deeper it sets — until they are wary of strangers, and eventually wary of you. Past that point this is no longer a search; it is a trapping operation, and a much longer one. A dog that keeps moving can also simply walk out of the area we are able to reach.
There is risk on both sides and we will not tell you otherwise. But the risks of waiting compound while the reasons to wait do not: it lowers the chance of getting your animal back, it raises the chance that a search booked later is one you pay for and that finds nothing, and it gives everything above more time to happen. Time is not your friend in a lost dog case.
What a search buys, even if we don't find them
It is fair to ask before spending anything: what happens if we fly and your animal is not there?
A flight that finds nothing still changes what you do next. Clearing ground is real information. Knowing your dog is not in the greenbelt behind your house redirects every hour that follows toward somewhere it might actually pay off, instead of walking the same ground again in the dark.
Finding an animal sooner also tends to mean finding them in better condition. Every additional day carries another chance of a road, a predator, exposure or an injury — and the veterinary bill for an animal recovered late can easily exceed what the search itself cost.
A flight also stands in for an enormous amount of human effort. One evening in the air covers ground that would take dozens of volunteers days to walk, assuming you could find dozens of volunteers. Most owners are spending annual leave, sleep and everything else while this is going on. Getting back to your life sooner carries a real cost of its own, whether or not anyone puts a number on it.
And there is a difference between searching for a person and searching for an animal that is worth understanding before you decide more boots on the ground is the answer. A lost hiker is trying to be found: they call out, they stay put, they move toward you. A frightened dog is doing the exact opposite. Its entire instinct is to not be seen, because everything that ever hunted its ancestors hunted by looking. It will lie still in cover while you walk past at ten feet. Ground searching is working directly against the animal's own effort. Thermal is not, because heat is the one thing it cannot hide.
The regret we hear is rarely from people who paid for a search. It is more often from someone who took four or five days off work, covered a fraction of the ground far less thoroughly, and still did not find their dog — or who waited, and had something happen while they were waiting.
A search is not a lottery ticket riding on one outcome. It buys information, it buys speed, and it buys back your own time — and those hold their value whether or not the animal is under the camera that night.
Not everyone with a thermal drone is doing the same job
"A drone" has stopped meaning anything useful. The distance between the categories below is enormous, in cost and in the odds of getting your animal back. Each has its place. They are not interchangeable.
- A neighbor with a consumer drone
Start with what the aircraft actually carries. A consumer drone has no thermal camera at all — it has an optical one, and from any altitude worth flying, that camera cannot resolve a deer standing in an open field. A dog lying in brush, with a coat close in color to the ground around it, is far past what it can do. Drones are purpose-built for different jobs: a consumer drone is superb at waterfalls and landscapes, and a cinematic drone will shoot beautiful video of your neighborhood. Neither is built to find an animal.
That color problem is not bad luck. Animals spent millions of years evolving to disappear against their own surroundings in visible light, and they are extraordinarily good at it. What none of them ever evolved is a way to hide their heat. That is the whole reason this works — thermal looks at the one channel nothing has adapted to conceal.
Then there is light. Consumer drones carry no spotlight. At dusk and dawn, the hours a dog is genuinely up and moving, the image is already falling apart, and once the sun is properly down there is nothing to see at all. Through a Texas summer that is exactly when animals come out of cover to move — so the window most worth searching is the window the equipment cannot operate in.
Neighbors with drones do not find lost animals. Not never — anything can happen — but close enough to never that it should not change your plan. And the real cost is not the wasted evening. It is walking away believing an area has been cleared when nothing involved was ever capable of clearing it.
- A thermal pilot from another industry
Roof inspections, solar farms, utility lines. Real thermal skill and genuinely capable equipment, with no grounding in animal behavior. Reading a heat signature is not the same as knowing where a frightened dog goes at 3am, what a search pattern should cover, or which of the six warm shapes on the screen is worth a second pass.
- A thermal pilot who specializes in lost pets
Knows where to look and how to fly it, which is most of the search. Where this can stop short is afterwards: locating an animal and recovering one are different problems, and a pilot without recovery experience or equipment can hand you a position and no way to act on it.
How to tell which one you are talking to
- "Thermal drone pilot" is not a qualification. Ask what it means for them.
- Anyone who buys a thermal drone can use the phrase, accurately, the same afternoon. It describes a purchase. On its own it separates nobody from anybody, which is exactly why it is the phrase most often offered.
- Ask for hours flown on thermal at night, not hours flown on thermal.
- Solar farms, roofs and substations are real thermal work and they are daytime work, on large fixed objects that hold still and radiate predictably against a background that is not trying to hide anything. None of that prepares somebody for one small warm thing moving through cover at three in the morning. The equipment transfers; almost none of the reading does.
- Ask whether anyone there is certified, and in what.
- A certification like the ITC Level I Aerial Thermographer means somebody has been assessed on how thermal imaging behaves — emissivity, reflected temperature, what the atmosphere does to a reading — rather than on which button makes the picture orange. It is not a guarantee and its absence is not a disqualification. It is the one part of the answer that can be checked rather than taken on faith.
Ask whoever you are considering which of these they are. Most will tell you straight, and the answer should change both what you expect and what you pay.
If a search isn't the right call
Not every case needs one, and this is the page to say so.
If they went out an hour ago into a fenced neighbouring pasture, you will probably have them back before anyone could be on site. If they are already found and the problem is getting them home, that is a stock trailer and a neighbour, not a camera. If the ground is unbroken cedar with no gap in the canopy, we will tell you the odds are poor rather than sell you a flight.
Send the details anyway. You will get a straight answer about whether a search is worth your money in your situation, and you will get it before you have spent anything finding out.
One of them, filmed
On 11 September 2025, at 5:58 in the morning, Andie ran out of the house and was struck by a vehicle. Her owner called. After a short conversation we deployed to the scene and put an aircraft up, and sixteen minutes into the search we found her — miraculously unhurt — sitting waiting to be collected. Forty-three minutes after we arrived, at around eight, she was back in her owner's arms.
Sixteen minutes is not typical and nobody should book a search expecting it. What this one does show is the part that repeats: a call answered before six in the morning, an aircraft over the right ground shortly afterwards, and a thermal picture taken in the hour when thermal actually works. A dog hit by a car is also the clearest case there is for flying immediately rather than waiting for a better window. The rest of this page argues that those things decide searches. Here is one where they did.
The Andie Rescue — 11 September 2025, filmed on the search.
Questions people ask
I'm already driving the fence line. Is this actually better?
For the first hour, no — go and find the gap. That is the highest-value thing anyone can do and nobody can do it for you. After that, yes, and by a wide margin. A truck can only look along ground it can reach, at eye level, with a spotlight that throws a couple of hundred feet. A camera at altitude looks down into the middle of sections that have no road into them at all. A horse standing in the far corner of a neighbour's back pasture is invisible from every road around it and obvious from above.
How would you even find them at night?
By heat, not by light. A thermal camera reads temperature, so darkness is irrelevant to it — and a 1,200lb animal is the easiest thing it looks for. Cattle and horses hold and radiate far more heat than a dog does, which means they register from an altitude where a small animal would not, and each pass covers much more ground as a result. On most rural flights they are the first things on the screen whether we were looking for them or not. In typical conditions a cow or a horse in open field reads from about half a mile away, in complete darkness.
Several head are out. Does that make it worse?
Better, for the finding. A group is a bigger and brighter target than one animal, and stock that scatter usually regroup within a few hours. What a group changes is the recovery rather than the search: locating fifteen head is quicker than locating one, and moving fifteen head back through a gap is considerably slower. We will tell you where they are and which way they are facing. Getting them home is your work and your neighbours', and it usually wants daylight.
They're on somebody else's land. Does that stop you?
Not from finding them. We fly from ground we have permission to be on and the camera does the rest, so a neighbour's back pasture is well within reach of a flight that never crosses their fence. Recovery is a different matter and it is a conversation with that landowner, not a technical problem — which is why ringing the neighbours early is on the list above. Knowing an animal is in a specific corner of a specific section makes that conversation short.
Why a form instead of just calling you?
Because the call goes better afterward. A useful conversation needs the last known location, where they got out, the ground around it and what has already been tried — twenty minutes to collect by voice, five to type. If you send it first, we read it before we ring you and we start from what matters.
How quickly can you get out here?
Typically same day, and for stock the timing question is easier than it is for pets. Thermal reads the contrast between a warm animal and cool ground, and in Texas the ground holds the day's heat well past sunset — it is coldest, and the contrast best, around sunrise. Size buys you flexibility: an animal this large is findable early in the evening in a way an eight-pound dog is not, so we are rarely forced to wait for first light. Urgency overrides the rest. If there is a road involved, we move.
How can you see anything in the dark?
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.
How much ground can one flight cover?
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.
Can thermal see through trees?
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.
Where do you cover?
Central Texas, 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.
What does it cost?
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.