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by coreymatyas 2620 days ago
There are a handful of products for pets at least. I'm personally familiar with Whistle. It's collar-mounted, works fairly well for a large dog in a rural area despite spotty cell coverage (which the software doesn't handle terribly gracefully). Amusingly, the monthly subscription is only a third the price of the product in the OP.

For livestock to be a viable market, the monthly subscription would have to go down substantially. In the US, your large market segments are poultry, pork, and cattle. Chickens just aren't worth enough. Hogs are $75-150 live (with thin profit margins) and are a pain to catch, though I'm not familiar with escape rates in commercial operations. Cattle are worth 10x that and do escape occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult to find nor catch.

Perhaps there's a market for tracking hogs for small farms and cattle for commercial grazing operations, but I'd be surprised if tech could do much to disrupt the existing low-cost solution: ear tagging and a phone call when your neighbors/police find a cow on the road.