KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Facial recognition to find lost pets? Yep, there's an app for that.
The app is called Finding Rover. KC Pet Project said the free app allows people to look for lost pets, post found ones and even adopt.
Users are also able to register their pets on the app.
"That way if your pet ever does go missing, that way they're in the system, we have a picture of them, the information is available to them," Tori Fugate with KC Pet Project said. "So our staff is utilizing finding rover as well."
Fugate said this new tool will hopefully help cut down the number of animals coming into the shelter on a daily basis.
"We get lost and found pet reports every single day coming into our shelter and we're taking in 30 animals a day right now," Fugate said. "With so many animals coming in lost, with nobody coming in to come look for them, so we hope that Finding Rover is a really successful tool for us to get pets back home."
She said technology in general has been a huge help for animal welfare.
"We do have a lost and found Facebook page as well that shows all of our pets. We post all of our lost pets on our website so we're using technology as much as we can to get pets back home with their owners," Fugate said. "We also encourage to people to post lost and found pets on Nextdoor, that way if somebody in the neighborhood is missing them, they don't have to come to the shelter so that's another great way to utilize technology."
KC Pet Project has already seen record-breaking numbers in 2019. In the month of April, it had about 950 pets come in. Those are numbers they usually don't see until summertime.
"So May is already on track to be a record-breaking month for us, which leads us to believe June, July and August are going to be very difficult with a lot of high-intake months coming our way," Fugate said. "So we're working really hard to get the new shelter built and to work to save lives around here."
Although the animal shelter just started using Finding Rover, Fugate said it's already seen success stories.
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