I also despise everything this would mean in terms of state surveillance, but if you could isolate this capability, it 100% would help recover lost dogs. Speaking from experience. We lost our dog for 6 days and didn’t have any idea where he was until 3 days passed. The most effective way to recover lost dogs is by knowing their current location and setting out live traps with food for them to find at night. Scared dogs don’t recognize their owners by sound so driving around calling for them wouldn’t help.

So if it this technology could work solely as a lost pet sighting tool and not a dystopian state surveillance tool, it would be immensely helpful.

Yeah, I would too. The argument wasn’t that it’s a net good. The argument is that if it were to work as they claim and only identify animals matching the description of lost pets using a mesh network, then that helps pets and pet owners. That’s objectively true.

And air tags rely on Bluetooth signaling. Lost pets often avoid people so they don’t work very well in most cases. The only options that do work are subscription based(gross) GPS trackers that use cell towers and GPS signals to determine their location. Which we have now, but thanks.