How Sure Petcare connected products can help you and your pet sitter

1st April 2019

Many pet owners lead busy lives and take holidays without their pets, leaving them in the care of a pet sitter. So how can Sure Petcare products keep you connected with your pet while you are away, ensuring they stay happy and healthy?

Our connected products can be a real help. Here we take a look at some Sure Petcare connected product users who have worked with their pet sitters to provide consistent care for their pets whilst they are away.

Daniel and his cats Casper and Tsuki

Before we got our connected products, we had to try to explain to the pet sitter how to care for our cats either face to face or by leaving notes. We’d have to explain exactly how much we feed our cats, who has medication and what to do with it, plus who is an outside cat and who isn’t. It was quite stressful. Our Microchip Pet Feeder Connect and Microchip Cat Flap Connect have changed that.

Scales on the Microchip Pet Feeder Connect make life so much easier for us and the pet sitter. All we have to do is tell her what type of food each cat has. She can then fill up the bowls using the LED lights to guide her to the correct portion weight, meaning even when we’re away the cats are getting the same amount of food that they usually do.

We love receiving notifications when our sitter tops up the cats’ bowls, because we get notified in real-time with exactly how much food she’s given them. It helps us to ensure that when our pet sitter agreed to come at 8am and 5pm, we can see that she did. It’s also nice to see a couple of minutes later how much they’ve eaten. The feeders offer reassurance that the cats are happy with our pet sitter and eating as normal.

When Casper first had to take Thyroid medication, we would wedge the tablet inside of a treat and then watch him eat, while trying to keep Tsuki away with other treats. This was quite an awkward task for our pet sitter. Now we use the Microchip Pet Feeder Connect, we don’t have to ask our sitter to do anything difficult. She can just pop the tablet in his bowl with his wet food and we know Casper is the only one who can get to it.

The Microchip Cat Flap Connect is also ideal for us and our pet sitter when we go away. If we’re going away, we like to set the curfew, so we know they’re both safely inside at night when we aren’t there. This also means our pet sitter doesn’t have to worry about who is allowed outside or if one cat escapes past her when she arrives. We know the cat can come back into the house, even if it the curfew is set.

Both products have made us feel more connected to our cats while we are away, and they help us to get an indication that they are behaving as normal when the pet sitter is around.

Catherine and her cat Colin

My neighbour looks after our cat Colin while we are away. If we didn’t have the Microchip Cat Flap Connect with the curfew, I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting Colin to continue to go outside whilst we’re away. It gives me that extra sense of security being able to see that he’s able to stick to his normal routine and come and go within the curfew times.

Colin is a definite creature of habit. The app has shown us that he goes in and out at roughly the same times every day, so seeing this pattern continue is comforting. I also know that if I did see behaviour that was drastically different from his norm, I could ring my neighbour and get her to investigate. That is a big thing for me.

Luca and his cat Benji

I was away last week with the whole family, so I asked a neighbour to feed our cat whilst we were away. We leave our cat free to come and go as he wishes, and thanks to our Microchip Cat Flap Connect, it was reassuring to see in the stats that he was coming home regularly to be fed and to spend the night on the sofa.

It was also useful for us to know his pattern quickly adapted and that although he would come and go he would spend most of his time at home. We feared that with nobody in the house all the time, he could think we left for good and therefore leave as well. He is a rescue cat, who we believe was on his own since birth, so it’s taken a while to make him feel safe and part of the family.

Kathleen and her dog Bella

Bella wears an Animo and prior to our holiday I asked our pet sitter whether she would like to join our Animo household in the app, so she could sync Animo and we could get updates on Bella whilst we were away. We hadn’t used this particular pet sitter before and hoped that this way we would get a better idea of her service.

Whilst we were away it was lovely to see how much exercise Bella was getting and how much more running she did whilst she was with her new four-legged friends. They had a day out in the countryside, which shows in the huge spike in the activity graph and the day after was a rest day. The whole service was quite costly, so we were pleased to see that it was well worth it. Something else that we learned was that we will have to advise the sitter to ensure that Bella isn’t over-exercised as she has joint problems in her back legs and the spike in activity led to a decline in sleep quality the following night, which might have been due to pain in her legs.