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Be Your Own Big Brother: Peeking at pussy
I know what your cat did last summer
Feature Last year, the BBC's Horizon programme treated the cats of a Surrey village to individual cameras, and their own prime-time spot on TV to share the results. And now the Beeb is at it again with Cat Watch 2014, hoping to find out a little more about what our feline companions get up to.
Whether you're a dog or a cat person, huge numbers of us have a furry ball of fun to share our lives with. But just how much of their life do they really share with us? As Horizon revealed, there's undoubtedly a fascination with knowing what our pets get up to when we're not around.
There's also, sometimes, worry as well. A few weeks ago a neighbour was convinced that her cat had been taken by a fox, which led to plenty of fretting from other pet owners in the street. Fortunately, it turned out that the scared animal had merely been hiding up a tree for a day.
Guess who's coming to dinner? Motorola's Scout 83 dishes the dirt on Fido
Whether it's for peace of mind or plain curiosity, there's plenty of tech out there that can keep an eye on Fido, and monitor the moggies.
Face time
At its simplest, of course, if you just want to see what's going on, then any of the sort of IP cams I've talked about before will do the job. Of course, how useful they'll be will depend on the habits of your pets and how much free reign you give them. To paraphrase, you can point a camera at a cat bed, but you can't make the cat sleep there.
While any video camera will do, there are some that are aimed specifically at pet owners, like Motorola's Scout 83. It boasts a 720p resolution, and two way audio, so you can talk to your pet and, presumably, hear confused noises when it can't find you.
A chewy toy for your pet? No it's a Binatone Motorola surveillance camera
The device also includes temperature monitoring and motion detection as well. A timeline feature allows you to review photos or video clips triggered by motion, in the hope of finally making it to You've Been Framed. All that said, it's really just the marketing that sets the Scout 83 apart from any other IP camera.
In fact, Motorola – or rather Binatone, to whom the brand is licensed – has a whole range of pet tech including training devices designed to stop your dog from straying too far, or control barking.
Checking up on what's happening indoors, of course, is fine for animals that don't come and go as they please, like dogs or tropical fish. Though rather than spend the best part of £100 on a camera to watch your tropical fish, I'd advise a screensaver instead.
Dogtek's Eyenimal: positively bling on small pets
What most of us would really like to know is where our pets go when they're outside. While you might not get the same sort of quality of images as Horizon, there's a growing range of cameras designed to fit on cat and dog collars. At the cheap and cheerful end some look as if they're almost as big as a cat's head.
However, spend more and you can get products like those from Dogtek (don't panic; it makes cat-sized cameras too). Dogtek's Eyenimal costs under £60 in the UK, and features an auto-focus camera, with a recording time of around two and a half hours. Just think how many more crimes The Famous Five could have solved if Timmy had one of those!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
