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PetTech Failure Leaves Animals Starving

A so called smart $299 pet feeder that is being sold at retailers such as Petbarn in Australia has been slammed after the device failed in some cases leaving pets “to starve” for days.

Manufactured by Petnet the device was released in Australia back in September, now owners of one of the device which are designed to release food for pets based on settings made via a cloud based app say their animals were left hungry during a week-long system failure.

The failure was first reported by the BBC who tried to contact the Company on its advertised email address, the email bounced back with a delivery failure notice.

Several retailers including JB Hi Fi have moved to sell PetTech products in recent months.

One feeding bowl that was designed for ‘small pets” in Asian apartments did not release enough food for “large Australian dogs” who ended up destroying the smart feeder by chewing the feeder.

The PR Blurb syndicated by Petnet in September claims that their SmartFeeder allows pet parents to automatically feed their pets with intelligently tailored meals to ensure top-notch health and happiness.

They went on to claim that the when using Wi Fi all a user must do is ask Alexa or Google Assistant for help.

One pet owner tweeted: “My cat starved for over a week”, while others complained about other hardware issues.

“My three Gen2 feeders constantly jam and won’t dispense food,” wrote another.

Petnet has two Twitter accounts. The official one has not tweeted since 30 August 2019, but the support account issued four tweets between 14 and 21 February about the problems experienced.

In its first tweet it said a “system outage” was affecting second generation devices and asked customers not to switch off their feeder even if it appeared to be offline.

On 21 February it said smart feeders were “returning online” and a “system reset” was in progress.

Some customers tweeting to the support account complained of not having received a response.

The firm had faced similar problems in 2016.

The device which is also sold by Amazon has also attracted poor rating on Review sites with 60% rating either one or two.



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