Microchips for Dangerous Animals? 185
lucabrasi999 writes "CNN is reporting that Japan is moving towards requiring all owners of potentially dangerous animals (such as crocodiles and pythons) to have microchips installed in case the animal gets loose. Apparently there has been a wave of 'wild' animals that have been escaping their captivity. Did you know that it is actually possible to take your pet snake for a 'walk'?"
PETA? (Score:3, Insightful)
You Are Here (Score:3, Insightful)
HOW OUTRAGEOUS! (Score:3, Insightful)
And the regulations will only get worse!
Its only a matter of time before you have to have a license to keep exotic predators!
Oh wait...that's the way it is now. I guess society wants to keep track of its animals.
Carry on then.
Old news (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyways, why don't they just not let people take these animals into public? Is it really a good idea to take your croc for a wlk? Or better yet, why not ban the possession of them outright?
What's a "potentially dangerous" animal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank goodness! (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I like being at the top of the food chain.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what happens when you visit a news aggregation site. Either stop complaining or leave. Having news be "old" is a problem inherent with slashdot, get over it already.
Dangerous animals???? (Score:3, Insightful)
I also have a problem with opening the door to using the tracking of pets to track people. This smacks of over-reaction and the singling out of one class of pet owner either as a weird form of discrimination, or simply fear of what most people don't understand.
Go out and start tagging mosquitos since they carry west nile and malaria, they are far more dangerous world wide to humans than pythons.
Re:Snake-walk! (Score:0, Insightful)
I really don't see this whole chipping thing working... I keep a large collection of venomous snakes, some of which are too small to microchip. I don't consider my animals "dangerous" to the general public, as the general public has no access to them. I put myself and only myself at risk by keeping these animals, and as long as I do it responsibly I see no reason for a government that knows so little about what they're trying to regulate to tell me what to do with my animals.
Several reasons for microchipping (Score:5, Insightful)
Prelude to chipping people (Score:3, Insightful)
There have already been moves [com.com] in this direction, towards tagging prisoners in Mexico (the Mexican AG is tagged to help people get used to the idea), towards tagging schoolchildren in part of Japan, and so forth.
On the whole, I don't really like the idea of tagging. We have a pretty robust social system precisely because it's not possible for a single group to tightly monitor and everyone in a state -- he'd be facing almost instant rebellion. However, at least tagging is better than biometrics (at least if someone compromises your chip, you can just get a new chip -- if someone compromises an iris scan, you have a problem).
The other problem is the huge number of companies who are trying badly to sell RFID tags for everything. RFID is the most oversold technology since XML. Not that RFID isn't useful -- it's convenient for a specific (not *that* common) case of having to scan unusually-shaped objects, where retrying a scan is acceptable, where the speed is not that high, where there are not multiple objects close together, and where the range is very short (a foot or two). This pretty closely describes what happens at a retail checkout counter, which is the big killer app for RFID. On many similar boxes you can have scannable labels, on high-speed packages you need to be able to do a read faster, and so forth.
The thing is, Wal-Mart has backed RFID in its products (which makes sense from its standpoint -- to handle that inventory problem), and now that there's a market, there are eight zillion companies trying to convince every business out there that they *need* RFID yesterday, which is absurd -- in many ways, RFID is a step *backwards* from less-complex technology.
As you can tell, I'm not really thrilled about the motivations of most of the people pushing stuffing chips into everything either -- if there's a direct, measurable, pragmatic benefit, then it's worth evaluating something like this. Otherwise, it's just technology without a purpose.
Re:PETA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, that attitude is closer to what mainstream media wants you to think. Anyone who's ever worked with PETA or talked to PETA members would know that the organization is primarily about disseminating information and raising awareness about animal rights. It's funny how easily people buy into the astroturfing and FUD spread by corporate entities that dislike PETA but never take the time to even visit the PETA website or pick up a flier and read about actual campaigns.
Contrary to popular beliefs, 99.9% of PETA members are not extremists (unless holding public talks, organizing vegetarian potlucks, and handing out fliers about animal rights are acts of terrorism). Even though the media likes to only cover radical actions taken by members of progressive movements these incidences are rarely representative of the movement as a whole. It's just a way to undermine their message by using red herring arguments magnifying the actions of a few radicals to take attention away from the real issues at hand. It's easier to say "they're a bunch of terrorists" than it is to defend draize tests that produce no useful scientific data or other immoral business practices.