Microchips to Save Peru's Alpacas

lakeesis writes "BBC News has published an article stating: 'Peru has launched a campaign to implant microchips in hundreds of pedigree alpacas to try to stop the best animals being smuggled out of the country. Officials say they know alpacas are being sneaked across Peru's borders'."

Comments

Re:Removal?

[acceber]

The plan is to tag some 900 top alpacas within five years.

I understand that Peru wants to save their pedigrees but tagging 900 out of 3,000,000 native Alpacas isn't going to be very effective. Although it's a great initiative, they're only micro-chipping a mere 0.03% which would make catching smugglers are very inefficient process.

Re:Technology for the sake of technology?

[shikra]

Apparently you have not had any real world contact with such technology. I happen to be in rather close contact with the Asian Arowana (Scleropages formosus) industry, and this technology has been used rather successfully. The fish has been deemed endangered by CITES, and as such it would be illegal to catch it from the wild. CITES-registered farms are required to tag each fish with an electronic microchip, and these farm-raised fish can then be exported or sold domestically. All the officials needed to do during their routine checks for illegal stock is to scan the fish in question with a hand-held scanner, which would reveal a registration number instantly (which could be matched with a paper certificate of authenticity).

Re:Removal?

[daniil]

But protecting every alpaca from being smuggled out of the country isn't even the point. The point of this program seems to be to keep the "best" (best from whose point of view?) alpacas in. They are only going to tag 900 animals, as they assume that the smugglers won't be interested in the other three million animals (and if they are, then it still isn't as great a loss to the economy as the loss of these pedigree animals would presumably be).