Furbo Dog Camera with Treat Tossing

A pet camera is easy to justify and hard to use well. You watch your dog sleep for a week, then stop opening the app. The Furbo survives that phase for one reason: it tells you when something happens instead of waiting for you to look.

The barking alert

The camera listens for barking and sends a push notification when it hears it. For anyone dealing with separation anxiety or a complaint from a neighbour, this is the feature that matters. It tells you not just that your dog barks, but when — five minutes after you leave, or at three in the afternoon when the post arrives. That timing is the information a trainer actually needs.

Reading the timings, because that is the real product

The pattern of alerts says more than any single one, and the shapes are well known enough to recognise. Barking that starts within ten to thirty minutes of the door closing and then settles is normal adjustment. Barking that starts in that window and does not stop is the picture of separation distress, and it is the one to take to a behaviourist rather than a louder deterrent. Barking in short bursts scattered through the day, especially around the same times, is usually triggered by something outside: the postman, a delivery round, a dog walked past the window. That kind responds to blocking the view or moving the dog's resting place, which costs nothing.

Keep the notifications for a week before you change anything. A fortnight of timings tells you which of those three you have, and they need completely different responses.

Treat tossing

It is a genuine feature and also a genuine gimmick. Load the canister with small round treats, press the button in the app, and one fires a metre or two across the room with a tone that dogs learn quickly. The practical use is calling a dog to the camera so you can see them, and rewarding calm. The impractical use is what most people do, which is firing treats until the canister is empty.

Treat size matters. Round, roughly one centimetre, dry. Anything irregular jams the mechanism, which is the most common complaint.

There is a training trap worth naming. If you toss a treat every time the dog barks, you have rewarded barking, and dogs learn that faster than anything else in this list. Toss when the dog is quiet and settled, and ignore the barking; the tone becomes a marker for calm rather than a prize for noise.

Camera and audio

1080p with 4x zoom, a wide view of the room and colour night vision using infrared. Two-way audio works in real time; whether your dog finds your disembodied voice comforting or distressing varies enormously by dog, and it is worth testing before relying on it.

The design is deliberately domestic — a white tower with a bamboo-effect top — because a pet camera lives in a living room, not a server cupboard.

Where to put it

On a low, stable surface, facing the space where the dog actually settles rather than the middle of the room, and far enough back that a bored dog cannot reach it. A pet camera at nose height on a coffee table is a treat dispenser waiting to be tipped over. Keep it off the floor for airflow and out of direct sunlight, and route the cable behind furniture, because a chewed mains cable is a worse problem than any it solves.

Subscriptions

This is where care is needed. Different Furbo listings bundle different things, and some of the AI features — person detection, dog activity alerts, video history — require a paid plan. The core functions of live view, barking alerts, two-way audio and treat tossing are available without a subscription on the standard models. Check exactly which version a listing is before ordering.

Should you buy it?

Buy the Furbo if you are working on separation anxiety or barking and you need to know when it happens. Skip it if you just want a camera, in which case a general security camera does the same for far less.