Earlier this year my family got a dog. Her name is Millie, also known as Moo, The Moo, Mooey, and Mooet Chandon. Naturally, given all I care about in life is Mooey now, when I heard that there was a gadget called the Furbo that allowed you to watch your pets from anywhere via a nifty little app – I needed one. Immediately.
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I chatted to Amazon Australia and they gave me a Furbo via their Amazon Pets section, which has everything from basic needs like food and toys right through to weird tech like the Furbo.
To give you a brief overview, the Furbo is a sleek white and bamboo stand, it looks a bit like an oil diffuser thingy.
It’s really, really easy to use and to set up – you put treats in the top (the bamboo bit lifts off), and you download the Furbo app to your phone and follow the prompts. It plugs in via a USB cord, and you can easily unplug and re-plug it to move it around through the day/night.
Then, it works off wifi so no matter where you are – work, the bus, at the club (yes I did do this), in Spain, you can see exactly what your dog is doing. Or your cat, or your bird. Whatever.
I gave it a whirl for a week and now I have an addiction where I load the bloody thing up every goddamn hour to watch Mooey sleeping. Which, spoiler alert, is really all she does.
Here she is in the lounge room – sleeping.
I should run you through what all those icons are. The weird ball in the middle? Flick it up with your finger and it’ll throw treats to your dog. It makes a cute squeaky noise which Millie quickly identified with “FOOD INCOMING”, but you can change it to whatever you want – your voice saying “treatie!”, a BWAAARP alarm, “FUCK YEEEAH FOOD TIME!” – whatever.
On the right is a microphone – click it once and it starts transmitting your voice and any noises around you through the Furbo to your pet. Yes, you can constantly say “HI BABY” to your pet, whenever you want. My advice is to not do it often because it freaks them the fuck out, from my experience. The Moo does NOT like it one bit to hear my disembodied voice at all hours of the day and night. Who knew.
The microphone is also working always on the actual Furbo gadget, and will send you alerts when your dog is barking if you want it to.
On the left are the icons to record video (you can take around 60 seconds at once) and take photos. I do this a lot. I have no strorage on my phone anymore.
What you see is what you get – the Furbo has 160 degrees of wide angle viewing, and no you can’t swivel the camera to catch more corners. You can, however, zoom in – it’s got 4x zoom which is handy when your dog likes to sleep on both their bed and the couch, like Mooey does.
It’s also got night vision, but we leave a night light on for The Moo because she’s a princess.
Side note, what is this sleeping style:
Don’t we all love squashing our head up against the wall to sleep?
Look, what I’ve found is that Moo generally just… sleeps. She loves to sleep. The only other things I’ve seen are that she can almost reach her food (see above in the photo there) by jumping, and she tries every damn night. And she will always – always – have one eye on the birds if she’s left in the yard.
Is it necessary? No, not at all. Is it worth it? FUCK YEAH IT IS. Who doesn’t like checking in on their dog, cat, or other beloved pet when you’re kilometres away and miss them? IMO the pretty high price point is worth it – I can’t see this thing breaking any time soon, it’s sturdy and made well. And there’s a comfort in knowing you’ll be alerted to any barking from your dog. You can check in and make sure they’re just yelling at a neighbourhood dog and not a robber!
You can get the Furbo via Amazon Australia HERE for $359 with free delivery within Australia.
