Cutting False Alarms with Verkada's New Animal Detection Feature

One of the most frequent challenges our clients face with perimeter security is “noise.” When you are monitoring a sprawling school campus, a remote utility site, or a large healthcare parking lot, motion detectors can be overzealous. A fox running across a lot at 3:00 AM shouldn’t trigger the same priority alert as a person attempting to access a restricted area. 

Because of this, we are excited to highlight the significant update from our partners at Verkada, Animal Detection.

The Problem: When Everything Triggers Motion

For years, video analytics tools only distinguished between people and vehicles. Everything else was lumped into generic motion. For organizations in semi-rural environments or sites with open perimeters, this created several issues.

• Alarm fatigue: Constant pings caused by deer, raccoons, or stray dogs and cats lead operators to ignore alerts, potentially missing real threats in the future.

• Wasted storage & bandwidth: Recording high-resolution clips of local wildlife isn’t an efficient use of cloud resources.

• Inefficient search: Trying to find when a fence was damaged requires scrubbing through hours of footage, often triggered by animals rather than humans.

The Solution: Verkada’s Intelligent Animal Detection

Verkada’s newest update uses on-device processing to classify animals as a distinct object type. This is a software improvement, not a hardware replacement, and it is already available in your Command dashboard.

Here is what this feature enables your team to do:

• Precision Filtering: You can now filter historical footage for Animals, alongside existing filters for People and Vehicles.

Example: If a community garden is vandalized, you can instantly filter for animals to see if local wildlife is the culprit, rather than wasting hours reviewing unrelated human activity.

• Smarter Alerts: Administrators can configure real-time alerts for when an animal is detected. This allows you to differentiate between a security breach and a wildlife event.

Example: Set human detections after hours to send an immediate SMS while logging animal detections without triggering an alert.

• Proactive Monitoring: Teams can monitor wildlife patterns that may cause operational or physical damage.

Example: At critical infrastructure sites, facilities teams can identify burrowing or nesting activity near equipment and address vulnerabilities before they escalate.

How to Enable Animal Detection

If you are an existing LTT Partners client with Verkada cameras, this feature is likely ready for you to turn on.

• Navigate to Command.

• Select your camera and go to Settings > Analytics.

• Ensure People Detection is enabled.

• Toggle Animal Detection to On.

Once enabled, your timeline will immediately begin populating with animal-specific events, giving you cleaner data and more accurate search capabilities instantly. 

Why LTT Partners Recommends This Update

We believe technology should work for you rather than the other way around. Verkada’s shift toward granular object detection aligns with our mission to streamline your operations. 

By reducing false positives, you allow your security personnel to focus on what they do best by responding to genuine incidents. This feature creates a more efficient security posture by:

• Reducing noise: By distinguishing animals from people, security teams can focus on alerts that matter most.

• Improving response: If your facility has specific concerns regarding wildlife, such as bears in remote locations or stray animals on school grounds, you can now set up a dedicated workflow to address them immediately.

• Seamless integration: As with all Verkada updates, this feature rolls out via cloud. If you are already using compatible Verkada cameras, this intelligence is ready to be deployed.

Ready to Optimize Your Perimeter?

While Verkada provides the technology, LTT Partners provides the strategy, deployment, and configuration needed to make security intelligence actionable across your organization. We architect complete security ecosystems that bridge the gap between IT, Facilities, and Safety teams. Whether you need to deploy this feature across a single school or hundreds of enterprise sites, our team ensures your system is configured for maximum clarity and minimum noise. 

Contact LTT Partners to chat with one of our experts.