PetAlerts lost pets app released for public testing

When a pet goes missing, it is one of the most distressing experiences a person can have, and there are more questions than answers - where do I look, what should I do, who should I call, and what’s going to happen to my pet? The chances are good that your pet will end up at a shelter, but the infrastructure around notifying pet owners in the community about pet intakes at shelters is currently limited.

Austin has been committed to being a no-kill city since 2011, and while this is a tremendous feat, it puts a lot of stress on the shelters harboring lost pets. From the city perspective, every lost pet is taking sorely needed space in overcrowded shelters - the sooner an animal can be returned home, the more space will be available for additional intakes, and the easier it is for Austin to preserve its no-kill status.

With little infrastructure and an already limited budget, shelters needed an answer. Open Austin has stepped up to help. What originally started as an ATX Hack for Change weekend hackathon project, PetAlerts is now being released for the community at large.

PetAlerts is a web app that allows users to search Austin shelter intakes for their pet, and to subscribe for notifications of new intakes matching their search via email or text message. The beta version only supports pets taken in at the Austin Animal Center, but the app was built with the intention of adding additional sources of information once beta is complete.

In the future, we hope to provide a resource for people to submit lost and found pets to classifieds, search databases for adoptable pets, and get more detailed shelter / location information. Ideally, this app will become the single resource for pets and shelters in the community - with this is mind, we’ve kept the code open source, the app free to use, and the direction of the project open to the public. It’s an app intended to service the community, and we welcome all community participation to make it as useful and ubiquitous as possible.

Obviously, we hope no pet owner will ever have to suffer the stress of losing their pet, but it can and does happen. When pets go missing, we will be there to help reunite them with their people as quickly as possible.

To make great use of this app, visit http://pet-alerts.open-austin.org/

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