Thermal Drone Search for Missing Livestock, Across Central Texas

The equipment on this page is the same equipment that looks for dogs in cedar at three in the morning. What changes, and changes entirely, is the animal.

A thermal camera reads the difference between a warm body and the cooler ground behind it. Three things decide whether that difference is large enough to see from the air: how much heat the animal gives off, whether anything is between it and the camera, and how much the ground has cooled.

Livestock win on all three at once.

Mass. A horse is around a thousand pounds of warm animal. A cow is more. That is an enormous amount of retained heat compared with a dog, and heat is what buys altitude — a bigger signature stays readable from higher up, and every extra hundred feet of altitude covers a great deal more ground per pass. The same flight that would need to work a suburban greenbelt carefully can cover a section of pasture.

Predictability. This is the part people underestimate. A frightened dog travels and settles somewhere it can see out of. A frightened cat compresses into the smallest dark space it can reach. Loose stock do something far more useful than either: they follow lines. Fences, tracks, creek bottoms, the edge of a treeline. They move toward water and toward other animals, and they stop somewhere that can be reasoned about — a corner, a gate, a stand of shade. A search for a horse is much closer to following a route than to covering a grid.

Terrain. Pasture, hay meadow, ranchland and hunting lease are the exact conditions thermal handles best: open, cool after dark, and with nothing overhead. The hardest ground we ever fly is dense housing, where roofs, cars and pavement hold the day's heat and swallow a dog-sized signature completely. Stock are almost never there.

That is the reasoning. Here is the evidence, and it is the closest thing to proof this page has.

On most rural searches, horses and cattle are the first things on the screen when the aircraft gets up. Not the animal we came for — them. We are there looking for somebody's dog, and before we have started working the ground properly the neighbouring stock are simply there, unmissable, lit up like street lamps. It happens so consistently that it is unremarkable to us and worth stating to you.

In typical flying conditions we pick up a cow or a horse in open field from about half a mile out, in complete darkness. Not as a shape to go and investigate — as an unambiguous animal.

Nobody is paying for those sightings. They are a by-product of several hundred hours of looking for much harder animals over the same country. Three things make it that reliable:

They cannot hide. The thing that defeats a thermal search is an animal getting between the camera and itself — under a deck, inside a shed, into a culvert, beneath a parked car. That is where frightened cats go and it is why we are honest about their odds. A horse cannot fit in any of those places. Its size rules out the entire failure mode.

They lie down in the open. A dog that beds down looks for cover to do it in. Stock do not: they drop where they are, in the middle of a field, and stay there. An animal asleep in open pasture is the easiest target this camera has.

They cannot be confused with anything else. This is the part people do not expect, and it matters more than raw detection. Thermal shows a great many warm things that are not animals — a rock that held the afternoon sun, a stretch of road, a transformer, machinery, a compost heap. At dog size those returns are genuinely ambiguous, which is why a search is thermal to find and zoom to identify. At horse or cow size, nothing in a pasture is that big and that shape. The identification step that costs time on a dog search barely exists here.

Most of the above is true of anything large enough. These are the differences worth planning around, and they are why one page covers all of it — the equipment, the conditions and the argument do not change by species, only the behaviour does.

Horses

Most of what is above applies to any large stock animal. A horse has two particular habits worth planning around.

The first is distance. A horse that is merely out will often be found within sight of its own fence, grazing, faintly embarrassed. A horse that has been frightened — by a storm, by a dog, by being chased — can cover several miles before it stops, and it will do it fast and in a straight-ish line. The gap it left through and the direction it was facing matter more for a horse than for almost anything else we look for.

The second is that a horse usually comes back on its own terms if there is something to come back to. An open gate into a small pen, feed it recognises, and its own trough at the gap will bring a great many horses home in the small hours without anyone flying anything. Do that before you do anything else. If it works, you have spent nothing. If it does not, we are looking for an animal that has decided it is not coming back yet, and that is a search rather than a wait.

Cattle

Cattle are a herd problem rather than an animal problem. They go through a gap together, usually after a storm has put a tree on the wire or washed out a low spot, and they stay together. They work along fence lines and settle near water or shade. Several head is a larger and brighter target than one, so finding them is quicker than finding a single horse — it is the getting them back through the gap that takes the time, and that generally wants daylight and more than one person.

Goats

The hardest of the livestock, and worth being straight about. Goats climb, and they get into brush, rock and broken ground that cattle and horses will not attempt. They are smaller, so the signature is smaller, and they are far more willing to be in cover. A goat out on pasture reads perfectly well. A goat in a cedar brake on a rocky slope is a genuinely difficult search, and closer to a dog problem than a cattle one.

Pigs

Pigs root, wallow and push into thick brush, and they are often moving at night when we are flying. A pig out on open ground is straightforward. A pig that has got into heavy cover is not, and a small one against warm ground is harder again.

Sheep

Sheep flock tightly, which makes a group an obvious and concentrated target. One honest caveat: fleece is an insulator, and a woolled sheep may read cooler than its size suggests. That is physics rather than something we have tested in the field, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

A lost dog usually settles within a mile or two and stays put. Stock do not. They are bigger, faster, and they keep going — a horse or a herd that is moving can put serious distance behind it in the time it takes to organise a search, and every mile of that widens the area to be flown geometrically rather than by a bit.

That is the argument for calling tonight rather than tomorrow, and it is stronger for stock than for anything else we look for. The animal is easier to find and the ground it might be on grows faster. Those two facts pull in opposite directions and the hour is what decides which one wins.

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.

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.

Dogs

Cats

Daylight — not flyableDaylight — not flyableSunsetSunrise

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.

1. 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.
2. 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. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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

DogsLivestockCatsOther animals

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.

More on searching for a lost dog

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.

More on searching for a lost cat

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.

The same thing it tells a dog owner, which is worth being plain about: where the animal is, or a considerably smaller area to work in.

On stock the second outcome is more useful than it sounds. A ranch is not a place you can search on foot in a night. Clearing four hundred acres and saying "they are not in any of this, and they are not on the neighbour's north side either" converts an open-ended problem into a bounded one, and it does it in one evening rather than three days of driving fence lines in the dark.

What it does not do is move them. Finding is ours; getting fifteen head back through a gap in a fence is yours, your neighbours', and usually a job for daylight.

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.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

Plenty of stock come home without anyone flying anything, and the honest answer for some cases is that the gate and the feed bucket will do it. These cost nothing and are worth trying first.

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.

Play “The Andie Rescue”, 6 minutes

The Andie Rescue — 11 September 2025, filmed on the search.

FAA Part 107ITC Level I ThermographerBBB AccreditedMatrice 4T / 30T

Questions people ask

Is a drone actually better than driving the fence line myself?

For the first hour, no — go and find the gap, that is the highest-value thing you can do and nobody can do it for you. After that, yes, and by a wide margin. A truck can only look along roads and fence lines it can reach, in the dark, at ground level, with a spotlight that reaches a couple of hundred feet. A camera at altitude looks down into the middle of sections that have no road into them at all, and 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 is finding a horse different from finding a dog?

It is easier, and it is the one case where we can say that plainly. Three things all work in your favour. Mass: a 1,200lb animal holds and radiates far more heat than a terrier, so it reads clearly from a higher altitude, which means each pass covers much more ground. Behaviour: a loose horse follows lines — fences, tracks, creeks — and settles somewhere that can be reasoned about, rather than wedging itself under a deck the way a frightened cat does. And terrain: stock are on pasture and ranchland, which is exactly the open, cool ground thermal was built for. A lost dog in a suburban greenbelt is a harder problem than a missing horse on four hundred acres.

Several head are out. Does that make it harder?

Easier. A group is a bigger and brighter target than one animal, and stock that scatter tend to regroup within a few hours. What a group does change is the recovery rather than the search — finding fifteen head is quicker than finding one, and moving fifteen head back through a gap is considerably slower. We will tell you where they are and what direction they are facing; getting them home is your work and your neighbours', and it usually wants daylight.

Can you see them if they are in the trees?

It depends what kind of trees. Scattered live oak, mesquite, a treeline along a creek — yes, largely, because the canopy is broken and an animal that size shows through the gaps as it moves. An unbroken cedar brake, no. Nothing sees through a closed ceiling, and we would rather tell you that before a flight than after one. If you know the ground they went into, tell us what it is and you will get an honest read.

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.

Does it matter whether you fly in the evening or before dawn?

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.

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.

How quickly can you get out here?

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.

Why a form instead of just calling you?

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 type. If you send it first, we read it before we ring you and we start from what matters.

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.

Tell us what got out and where. You will get a straight answer tonight.

Tell us what got outFive minutes. We call back within the hour.

Or call 512-808-0246