You can now use facial recognition to find your pet at the Pocatello Animal Shelter

POCATELLO — A local animal shelter has implemented a quickly developing technology to assist pet owners with finding their missing furry friends – facial recognition technology.

The Pocatello Animal Shelter has joined Petco Love Lost, which is a national database of animals in participating shelters. People who lose their pets can file a lost pet report with a picture on the Petco website, and facial recognition will return possible matches with their location.

“We’re making it a little bit more friendly towards the citizens of Pocatello so that they have a system that is checking all the time through their last report and constantly comparing it to other animals,” said Crystal Anderson, department specialist for the animal shelter who spearheaded joining Petco Love Lost.

Before this, the animal shelter used pen and paper to file missing animal reports. People could either come in person to fill out a report, or they could do it over the phone. These papers were sorted into binders that employees would have to go through and archive.

This created difficulty for the animal shelter because it’s a lot of paper for employees to go through and keep track of. Sometimes people would even give the wrong breed of dog or not add a picture to the file. This made it hard to identify animals through the paper system.

“When you have five to 10 reports coming in one day, it would have been a full-time job for somebody to just monitor the binders,” Anderson said.

Anderson began to look for an alternative to this system. She wanted to find something like Petfinder, where pet information could be posted online.

This is when Anderson found Petco Love Lost. She scheduled a meeting with Petco to learn more about the database and how it could benefit the community.

By July 24, the shelter got its login information and access to the system.

Anderson said that people who lose their animal “can put up a lost report. They’ll attach a picture, any information they have, like a microchip or tags, that … they can attach to their lost report, and the system will compare it with animals in shelters that have partnered with the system.”

Now that the Pocatello Animal Shelter has joined that database, people here can go to Petco Love Lost to report their missing animal and find out if they’re in the shelter. People can also report an animal they find to the system.

Anderson said that rather than provide a limited amount of results for people who file a report, it “casts a wide net” and returns a number of results that people can look through.

Anderson said that Petco Love Lost will “help animals get home sooner.” Back when they used the paper system, it could take up to three days to get a picture posted online — if a picture was received at all.

“The hope is that we can reunite the animals the same day they come in or the next day without having to wait so long,” Anderson said.