🤖 Cancel Your Pet Sitter. Robots Are Here.

In Today’s Email:

• Pet-sitters? Out. Robots? In.

• Nature vs. Nurture: a 98 year old DNA test you won’t believe. 🧬

• “The Squeeze” aka The Internet’s Best Dog News in 60 seconds.

• The Last Laugh: What we’re laughing with. Not at.

Robotics Are Propelling A $3 Billion Pet-Sitting Industry.

60% of the American workforce has traded in pandemic sweatpants for business casual attire and returned to the office full-time. The pet-sitting industry is poised to reap the rewards. Last year, pet parents collectively spent $3 billion on pet-sitting tools/services, and that is expected to double by 2030.

An increase in pet adoption, pet owners' preferences for pet care, and high disposable income are the three biggest factors driving the growth. Additionally, longer hours away from home are guilting a more sensitive generation of pet owners into seeking out canine stimulation while away.

• Need to bring your pup to work? Here are the 20 most dog-friendly companies.

A Harvard Business Review study concluded that 58% of people trust strangers more than their own boss, and this blind trust is what’s driving the success of on-demand, pet-sitting services such as Wag! and Rover since 2015. The two companies pair pet parents with a network of dog walkers and/or pet-sitters that will stop by your home to care for their pets while away. For pet parents with trust issues, this introduces a new stranger danger.

Cue the AI revolution. Companies such as Companion are capitalizing on the time you spend away from your fur baby, and their gadgets are positioning themselves as the alphas in the room.

Before the recent evolution in artificial intelligence, technology still required human involvement when it came to pet-monitoring devices. App-based platforms would alert us if a camera caught movement or sound was detected.

Companion’s bot steps in to remove the decision-making process from the pet’s owner.

So, I leave this robot in charge…?

…precisely. Companion’s robust cameras paired with an operating system driven by artificial intelligence allows for it to entertain, train and monitor your pet while you’re away.

blah, blah, blah…

Why we’re hooked: the device can monitor shifts in your dog's physical health as your pet grows older, and detect sudden or subtle changes in your dog's movement or routine over time, offering warnings and alerts to possible conditions that could require early intervention. This isn’t a pet-sitter. It’s your pet’s live-in veterinarian. 😲

But imagine if it could also wear the hat of a live-in trainer. We all saw I, Robot, so it begs the question: can technological advancements such as this eventually sideline humans? It could. To err is to be human. Well… properly-built technology doesn’t err. To take it a step further, artificial intelligence designs itself to learn from any failures it may have made in order to ensure they never happen again.

It takes six weeks (on average) to train a dog the basics. We can only carve out so much time in our days to our dog’s enrichment. Machines don’t tire. Companion can practice training commands like “sit” or “stay” and reward a pet with a treat for obeying the command. If the pet begins to get tired, the robot will sense a change in mannerism and body language to engage in more relaxed activity.

Their founder’s position on this: “We want to give humans a far greater understanding and an even better relationship with the dogs they care deeply about”

We like it…within reason. Training and enrichment is a bonding experience. We’re supporting any tool that can fast track the learning curve of our pets; however, we’re against a tool stepping in as the dominant figure when it comes to our pet’s emotional development.

If someone spends 8 hours/day at work, that’s 40 hours/week that they’ll be forgoing communication with their pet in lieu of an artificial intelligence engine that better understands your pet with each passing minute.

5pm on a Friday suddenly feels like…

Overheard at a the dog park:

“He keeps asking for my paw. I keep giving it to him. I have no idea what the terms of the contract are that I keep shaking on.”

“Get a lawyer, Zeus.”

- Nate’s Point Dog Park, San Diego, CA

98 Year Old DNA Reveals Ancestry Of Balto, Alaskan Hero.

Before Doordash, Alaska had Balto, a sled dog that led a 674-mile journey to deliver desperately-needed diphtheria serum to the children of Nome, Alaska. Diphtheria now has fewer than 20,000 cases per year, but this was 1925.

A 600-mile journey in blizzard conditions? Sure…sounds like a walk in the park 😅

More than 150 dogs in all took part in the record-breaking run, but it was Balto who led the final 53-mile stretch, and wound up getting most of the glory. He went on to tour the country, a bona fide celebrity. After Balto's death in 1933, his remains were preserved and put on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Due to the taxidermied nature of Balto, the University of California, Santa Cruz was able to conduct a DNA study on the sled dog nearly 100 years later.

How?!

Here you go, lab rats: the UCSC team took skin samples from the dog's belly and reconstructed its genome -- the complete set of genes in an organism.

Then…

…they compared this genetic material with that of 680 contemporary dogs from 135 breeds. Prior to the study, it was widely-believed that Balto was half wolf; however, no wolf blood was found in the study. Instead, Balto shared ancestors with modern day Siberian Huskies and the sled dogs of Alaska and Greenland.

"Balto had variants in genes related to things like weight, coordination, joint formation and skin thickness, which you would expect for a dog bred to run in that environment," the study’s scientist identified.

The bottom line from the research was that Balto had fewer potentially dangerous mutations than modern breeds of dogs did, suggesting he was healthier.

(talk about failing Darwin’s theory of evolution, dog parents 😬)

• If you’d like to have your dog DNA tested, check Embark. Maybe your husky is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of Balto?

The only thing on our minds are huskies showing up to the dog park with added swagger after this news:

Nepotism at its finest 🙄.

Hey green thumbs! Get those gardens ready…

“The Squeeze”: Dog News In 60 Seconds.

• 🏈 If you’re a football fan, you know Cleveland’s team is a fluffing color. That’s changing, dog lovers. They need your input.

• 🚗 Got a dog named “Bentley”? The car company wants to give you VIP access if you do…

• 🏃 Marathons? Bleh. Ultramarathons? Easy. Grab your sled dog and compete in Canada’s 450-mile dog race across Yukon. Just think of it as multiple trips to the grocery store. You’ll be fine.

• 🎂 Happy birthday to Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles. He may not be a dog, but we’re raising a glass to the king of pop’s primate completing 40 laps around the sun. Also…

• 🏋️ …Arnold Schwarzenegger got a mini pig named Schnelly. It’s not Schnelly’s birthday. We just can’t get the image of Arnold squatting a pig out of our heads.

• 💉 Hey Seattle! Amazon just updated pet vaccinations for free. Sniff all the butts you want!

• 👨‍🌾 Ahhhh! The smell of fresh mulch! Get those gardens together, spring enthusiasts. Just don’t plant these or it might be your dog’s last time in there.

• 💰 You may want to add to those piggy banks when you hear what Lemonade Pet Insurance thinks you should have saved in the event your pet has a serious accident.

• 📚 “Paws” for a study break, students. Active Minds and Paws for a Cause are helping students destress prior to finals. Petting dogs have a direct correlation to higher GPAs…prove us wrong.

• 🔬 A successful gene therapy trialed at Michigan State University in dogs with an inherited eye disease is ready to be developed for clinical use in human patients. Imagine if we can have their sense of smell, too?

Today’s Last Laugh:

Whenever you want to cancel plans, take a lesson from him: