() A woman who was away for the July Fourth weekend during the Texas floods was shocked to learn her dog had gone missing. Thanks to the GPS collar it was wearing, she was able to locate it.
Erin Douget was 1,500 miles away in Colorado when she was alerted that extreme flooding had overtaken her ranch and her beloved dog, Ziva, was missing.
Fortunately, Ziva was wearing a Tractive GPS collar, which included features that likely saved the dog’s life.
“Without that collar, Ziva wouldn’t have been found,” Douget said Friday on ” Live.”
Douget first received alerts from the collar’s app notifying her that Ziva had left the property. Back home in Texas, her sister Shannon and a pet sitter were caring for more than 200 animals on the ranch, according to People magazine. Douget quickly shared the tracking information with them.
At one point during the search, Douget feared the worst as she tracked Zina’s location to a flooded gully outside the grounds of the ranch.
“Not only was she in a desolate part of the river where there is no housing to see where she was at, there also wasn’t gonna be any foot traffic. Nobody was gonna be out there looking for her,” she said.
When Shannon and the sitter arrived at the location shown in the app, Ziva was nowhere in sight. But the collar’s pinging feature helped her locate the dog in thick brush along the river, 16 hours after she had gone missing.
“The ping is different enough from the sounds of surrounding nature,” she said.
Shannon sent Douget a photo confirming Ziva was alive and well.
Douget said she broke down in tears.
“She went back to being Ziva, like nothing had ever happened,” Douget concluded.
