A Dog Walker to Make You Feel Almost Like You Are There

Swifto 6:54 p.m.: Barnaby certainly needs a walk.

At 7:03 p.m. on May 25, my dog went to the bathroom in front of the Chinese massage place up the block from my house in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

I was not there, but I know this is true because a “poop alert” popped up on my laptop, 22 miles away at a friend’s house. A poop alert is a little white-on-brown icon of a squatting dog with, yes, a small pile beneath its tail, superimposed on a map of the walk fed by GPS data from the walker’s phone and updated every few seconds.

In addition, I received a text message on my phone. “Barnaby has just pooped.”

I cannot say that I was relieved, exactly - certainly not the way Barnaby was - but the people behind the high-tech dog-walking company Swifto, progenitors of the poop alert, say that many of their customers take great comfort in exactly this sort of information.

“A very common problem that a lot of dog owners have is that they don’t know that their dog walker has actually walked their dog,” said Mohammed Ullah, Swifto’s 23-year-old chief executive. The alert, he said, “lets the owner know exactly where, for instance, the dog has actually used the bathroom.” I pictured the middle-age woman from the massage place who sometimes smokes out in front of the building, averting her gaze as Barnaby completed his business.

Screen grab When the brown “poop alert” pops up, you know your dog has been productive.

File it under Things It Never Occurred to You to Worry About if you like. But in a 2003 New York magazine article about misbehaving dog walkers, a stockbroker named Joanne told how, made suspicious by her cocker spaniel’s desperate need for relief when Joanne arrived home from work, she draped the dog’s leash just so on the banister before leaving for work to see if it got moved. It didn’t. (Her neighbors who used the same walker, she said, set up a nanny cam and caught him entering the apartment, grabbing his money, and walking out without touching their dog.)

For the helicopter dog parent, Swifto offers any number of assurances.

Do you worry that your dog runner is not actually running your husky? Swifto’s mapping system lets you calculate the dog’s average speed down to fractions of a mile an hour.

Does your walker walk several dogs at the same time? Sure, dogs are pack animals, but pack walkers sometimes leave their charges tied in front of a building while they go in to make a pickup, leaving the dogs vulnerable to theft or injury. Swifto’s walkers give your dog undivided attention.

Swifto 7:18 p.m.: Barnaby meets an old friend.

And should you seek pretty much unfakeable proof that your dog is being walked, Swifto walkers send photos of your dog out on the street - though there are other dog walkers who do that.

Swifto’s walkers do not send pictures of the actual evidence of your dog’s effort, though Meredith, the pleasant young woman who walked Barnaby, offered: “When a dog has been sick, I have sent pictures of vomit. The owner found it very helpful.”

Swifto’s prices, while steep for a one-off walk ($35) are in line with the market if you sign up for regular service â€" $20 per half-hour walk. (My employer paid for Barnaby’s one-time test drive with Swifto.)

Swifto’s goal since its start last year, Mr. Ullah said, is to dominate an industry that has been almost exclusively the province of small operators.

“Most dog walkers in New York City can’t go past about 50 clients,” he said. “It overwhelms their scheduling.” Swifto’s technology, he said, “allows us to automate the entire process of pairing up dogs with walkers.” The company, with offices in Midtown, provides dog-walking in all of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

After moving his bowels, Barnaby (accompanied by Meredith) hung a right at the next corner, another right three blocks down, another right, a left and a right.

Then, according to the map, he went home.