One of my tasks every evening is to find the cat and get him in the house. He’s an indoor/outdoor cat, but he prefers to sleep inside at night, even though he isn’t always ready to turn in when I am. And he’s the same color as the dead grass around our house, so he’s hard to find.

After a few fruitless searches around the property, I got the great idea of outfitting him with a GPS tracking device. That way, even if he was hunting mice in a dense thicket of brush, I’d be able to find him with my smartphone. If you can find your keys with an app, surely you can get one to find your cat.

I looked...