A dog lover and entrepreneur has created a weather service tailored specifically to dogs.
It broadcasts tens of thousands of reports to users every month with the weather at the level of a dog’s head and paws.
It also includes temperature readings for asphalt, grass, and concrete, and variations based on breeds, body size, and coat length—all of which can help dog owners better plan their walks and excursions.
“This past weekend I stood outside a pet conference in Fort Worth, pointing an infrared thermometer at the asphalt. It read 131°F. The air was 98°F,” Clay Bartlett wrote to GNN in an email, saying that this 33-degree gap could easily result in burned paws even over a short distance.
“That’s why our team of veterinarians, nurses, and dog trainers created Pawcast by Weather.pet—because the temperature that our dogs feel can be wildly different from the way that you or I feel temperature,” he said.
From late-September through October, Pawcast delivered 28,000 alerts to more than 2,000 pet parents across all 50 states and DC. Each one gives a straight temperature reading, as well as “Dog Feel°.”
It’s actually not Bartlett’s first foray into online pet services. He and his veterinary team had spent 8 years building TeleTails, now a leading veterinary telehealth platform providing care for 1.5 million pet parents.
“Over the last year, our co-founder and Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr. Hilary Jones, noticed an increase in pet safety questions,” related to the weather, Bartlett said.
“We realized there was a massive information gap, with most veterinary literature on the topic reverting to a stale grid from 1998.”
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“So our veterinary team went out and actually did the work researching ground surface temperatures that our dogs experience every day. We took thousands of surface temperature readings across the country over the last year: asphalt, concrete, and grass, in cities, suburbs, and rural areas.”
“Those readings became the foundation for our model of how heat and cold reach a dog at ground level. Together, we’ve produced a dog-focused temperature reading that accounts for each dog’s breed, coat, age, and weight: our Dog Feel°, and route-specific estimates for the walk itself.”
It’s quite the effort, and the website couldn’t be more intuitive. The app is available on the App Store and Google Play Store.
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