An Alabama woman says a pet GPS tracker helped her rescue not one, but two missing animals after both wandered dangerously far from home.
Ashley Jordan, 29, lives in Wadley with her fiancé, Dusty, their child and three pets.
Earlier this year, one of the family’s dogs, a husky named Jax, slipped away from the house, passed his grandparents’ nearby home and headed toward a busy highway.
Jordan quickly noticed Jax was gone and opened the Life360 app connected to the GPS tracker on his collar.
She had purchased the tracker because Jax had a habit of escaping.
“We look at the app, and he’s on that highway,” Jordan said. “So we’re like, ‘Oh my goodness.’”
Dusty immediately jumped into his truck and followed the dog’s live location.
The tracker led him directly to Jax, who was standing near the side of the highway.
He managed to grab the husky before the dog was hit by a vehicle.
Jordan believes the situation could have ended very differently without the tracker.
After the close call, she decided to buy another device for the family’s orange tabby cat, Scotlyn, who sometimes likes to spend time outdoors.
At first, Scotlyn stayed close to the house and always returned home.
But after several months without a problem, Jordan admits the family became more relaxed about letting him roam.
In April, Jordan had to leave the house before Scotlyn returned from one of his outdoor trips.
She checked the app and saw that he was still nearby, so she assumed he would return home on his own.
When the family came back, however, Scotlyn was gone.
His tracker had dropped to just 5 percent battery and showed that he was on a dirt road far from the house.
Fortunately, the device had automatically switched into Reserve Mode, which helped conserve power while continuing to send occasional location updates.
Instead of using regular GPS and cellular signals, the setting relies on Bluetooth connections with nearby Life360 users.
That allowed Jordan to receive general updates whenever someone with the app passed close enough to Scotlyn’s tracker.
Finding him was still difficult because the family lives in a rural area surrounded by thick woods.
“Every now and then it would ping, and it would say he’s over here now,” Jordan said. “And he was getting closer, but I’m just terrified. There’s coyotes, there’s everything out here.”
Jordan searched for days and used the app’s community alert feature to notify neighbors that Scotlyn was missing.
The cat remained hidden.
Jordan was preparing to spend $500 on a thermal drone operator when she decided to give him one final night to come home.
At about 9 p.m., her phone suddenly alerted her that Scotlyn was near a neighbor’s house close to another busy road.
Jordan rushed to the area and activated a small light attached to the cat’s tracker.
She was overwhelmed with relief when she saw the light glowing nearby.
Scotlyn ran into the woods before she could grab him, but Jordan followed the flashing tracker through the trees.
When the cat finally spotted her, he raced over and jumped into her arms.
“I just ran to the car with him,” she said.
Jordan now makes sure every tracker in the house remains fully charged.
She believes the devices may have saved both animals’ lives.
“I really feel like Jax would’ve ended up hit by a car,” she said. “Or Scotlyn would’ve never come back because of all these woods around here.”