Police are using facial recognition to find the bad guys. Las Vegas uses facial recognition to find the whales. Facebook uses facial recognition to identify people in photos, and now a new app wants to use facial recognition to help you find your lost dog or cat.

PIP “Positive Identification of Pet” uses facial recognition software to help track down lost pets. Owners will upload their photo of their lost pet to the PIP network and then they will blast it out to everyone in their network including shelters and vet’s offices like an Amber Alert for pets. The photos will also be cross referenced with pictures of known missing pets to see if that narrows down search.

PIP CEO Phillip Rooyakers told ABC News he came up with the idea while he was working with a dog that had been newly adopted by a new family only 48 hours after arriving at a shelter. This meant that the dog’s original owners hadn’t even had time to mourn or properly look for the dog before he was at someone else’s home as someone else’s pet. Unfortunately this scenario plays out at shelters across the country all too often.

“It struck me that this dog was grieving, that he was missing ‘his true owners,’ and I knew that somewhere out there his true owners were also grieving,” Rooyakkers said in a statement. “The unfairness of this situation struck a chord with me and I knew there had to be a better way to reunite lost pets with their rightful owners.”

Find out more about PIP here.