Starting a fire, maybe, cooking an animal, extremely not likely.
Turn on an induction stove to max. Put your hand on it. Did it burn your hand? No. Put a ferrous pan on it. Suddenly, really hot.
Same concept happening here. A 36" induction stove top is likely putting out about the same inductive power. If the risk of being over the pad while it operated was enough to burn someone, so would cooking food on an induction stove.
Maybe? Iām definitely not an expert in inductive charging. I would think a cat laying between the charging pad and the receiver would be getting a big hit of radio waves. Maybe not.
Inductive current generation isn't utilizing radio waves. This isn't like a microwave oven.
If you put a chicken breast in a microwave oven and turn it on, it will rapidly cook. If you stand next to a radio antenna emitting hundreds of watts you can potentially get burns. These things use electromagnetic radio fields (E + H) to blast energy out, and those fields can stably radiate out on their own.
Inductive cooking and charging is radically different. If you put a chicken breast directly on an induction cooktop and turn the cooktop on, nothing happens. The unit doesn't even really increase its energy usage, because there is no load. This is because this energy transfer is relying on just the magnetic fields (H). It relies a lot on the target being harmonically in tune, and the other side needs to actually be conductive and at least somewhat magnetic. Non-magnetic materials don't couple with these magnetic fields. This is why some pans (like aluminum and copper) "don't work" with induction cooktops.
So if a cat did climb on the charging pad, maybe some parts of the collar would energize and heat up.
If animals were significantly affected by things like wireless charging pads or inductive cooktops we wouldn't be able to survive MRIs.
Starting a fire, maybe, cooking an animal, extremely not likely.
Turn on an induction stove to max. Put your hand on it. Did it burn your hand? No. Put a ferrous pan on it. Suddenly, really hot.
Same concept happening here. A 36" induction stove top is likely putting out about the same inductive power. If the risk of being over the pad while it operated was enough to burn someone, so would cooking food on an induction stove.