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Microchips for Dangerous Animals?
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'?"
Did you know that some things are a complete waste of technology and money?
Not to mention I'm sure this all puts us one step closer to having them embedded into people by law. This is just the beta version.
And they called me paranoid!
Has a group such as PETA made any comment with regards to this practice?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
People are the most dangerous animals.
--
make install -not war
Next thing you know, they'll be branding cattle, and tattooing ferrets!
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.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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?
Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dandy Dental Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice Dentrifice Dentrifice.
What exactly is a "potentially dangerous" animal? Most animals are potentially dangerous. Many dogs can easily harm humans. Will all dogs need to be embedded with such a device? Even cats can bite and scratch. Will they require tracking devices? Even timid bunny rabbits can give a good bite if provoked enough. Again, will they need such devices?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
wave of 'wild' animals that have been escaping their captivity
Proof of evolution? Or the pet owners de-evolving . . .
I read that as MOD chips for pets. I was so excited, but now...
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
Ha! Is the Japanese government willing to install, oversee, and monitor all of this? And track down offenders and illegally un-micro-chipped animals? Make an official classification of "that which is dangerous" and "that which isn't?" I guess this is for public safety, but it reeks of bureaucracy. I'm not so sure they can just force owners of snakes and crocodiles to buy microchips with their own money, especially when they're probably unwilling in the first place.
"Even timid bunny rabbits can give a good bite if provoked enough."
oblig monty python killer rabbit:
"I'm warning you!"
"What's he do? Nibble your bum?"
"He's got huge, sharp... er... He can leap about. Look at the bones!"
Sometimes I have to walk the dog reeeeally bad....
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
That's why we are at the top of the food chain. It's nice not to have to worry about a snake eating your young while you're out foraging for food isn't it?
Personally, I like being at the top of the food chain.
I'm sure this would have stopped the chaos that happened in Jurassic Park. All right then -- I'm off to write an e-mail to those British scientists who want to introduce lions and elephants into North America and buy stock in RFID chip makers!
Circumcision is child abuse.
"Did you know that it is actually possible to take your pet snake for a 'walk'?"
And did you know that you can also go for a 'stroll'?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What's the fuss? This practice has been required by law for anyone obtaining pets such as cats and dogs in Australia for years now. Both of my cats have them, and it's just a tiny implant with owner information, and the only trouble with them so far that I've heard of is that some have been known to slip out of place in the body of the animal and make it difficult to get the information out of them.
Yes, we should put microchips in dangerous animals in order to keep track of them. But how about those remarkably stupid beasts, or people? Shouldn't we also put a microchip in George W. Bush in case he gets loose?
If the animal gets loose, how much good will it really do to be able to track down the owner based the tag embedded in him?
Does "Dangerous Animals" include US Navy dolphins with toxic dart guns?
Many people are given the option of putting rfid tags in pets nowadays when they have the pets first vet visit. Our cats and dogs all have them and you wouldnt even know they were there, and none of them seems to be having problems with it. Personally i think its a good idea. If you can figure out how to enforce it then you have a great system to keep owners of large animals in control.
Err... *rubs eyes again*. Sorry. Been a long day. :)
I wonder how technologies like this are going to play out in places like Hollywood, where declawing a cat is currently forbidden by law, except in cases where the "animal guardian" (yes that's on the books too) may be injured by the cat. Also up for consideration are laws concerning other things such as tail docking and wing clipping.
Yanno, I've always had a problem with people saying animals like pythons are dangerous. Well let's see, considering more people die annually from dog attacks than pythons, we should be microchipping all pets. Okay, those figures are for the United States, but pythons are no more common as pets in Japan in the US. Hey, mice can carry diseases, despite the fact that most white mice owners don't let their mice near trash piles, but let's microchip them just in case! This is a non-problem.
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.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Did you know that it is actually possible to take your pet snake for a 'walk'?
I like to walk my boa constrictor up and down a golden valley everyday.
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
I thought only white people messed with alligators?
If this law was implemented in the U.S. we wouldn't have pythons exploding in the everglades:a tor_python
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051005/ap_on_fe_st/g
Apparently the poster of this topic is fascinated by the fight between python & alligator as seen in a previous slashdot posting. :)
Perhaps I have the insight to read between the lines as well as stating my opinion. Read the title. It doesn't say "Microchips for Dangerous Animals."
It says "Microchips for Dangerous Animals?".
Why would they put a question mark at the end of a statement? I'll tell you: this is Slashdotspeak for "Look at this title. Is this morally right? We should have arguments about this. Post your opinion."
My opinion is that it doesn't matter. Its just more of the same, and unlike what I would consider a troll post, I gave a reason for it, that I consider valid.
I'm open to the possibility that I'm trolling, though. You'll have a bit of a hard time convincing me, though. I know the motives of the guy who was posting, and he wasn't trying to get people angry and incensed.
Ah, yes ... Yes I did.
Will it keep them from eating ENDANGERED animals?
Why stop at dangerous animals? What about dangerous humans? What if you take your personal attorney for a walk and he/she escapes?
I would be afraid to have a mod chip for my cat because, with my luck it would bring out his more feral qualities. This could be a problem, considering that he's part bobcat...
He's my evil fuzzy ball of claws and teeth as it is. I don't need him actually breaking out of the house to try and take down my neighbor's (rather large) dog. He already tries to charge at her through the deck door as it is.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Forget that whole un-manned military vehicle idea. All you gotta do is implant some geese with some modified radio controlled microchips and you got your own mother-flocking air force.
So do they have a detector van from the 'Ministry of Housinge' going around looking for unchipped (and oresumably inlicenced) pets (named Eric)?
You think they're dangerous now? Wait until they're augmented with microchips. Fangs and computing power. Shudder.
'They cut the power.'
'What do you mean "THEY cut the power"? How could they cut the power, man? They're animals!?'
I've got a theory! It might be Bunnies!
Bunnies are just cute like everyone supposes!
They've got those hoppy legs and twitchy little noses.
And what's with all the carrots?
What do bunnies need such good eyesight for anyway?
Bunnies! Bunnies!
It's must be Bunnies!
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
Whole thing about stopped clocks being right twice a day and all that, I guess.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"...cages that were a little larger then the creature itself..."
Learn some grammar. Should it be:
"...cages that were a little larger then all of a sudden the creature itself..."
or
"...cages that were a little larger than the creature itself..."
You decide.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now you can turn them off at will with your TV-B-Gone. You can turn of 90% of dangerous animals within 17 seconds
They could make it illegal in a way that you have no defense when something goes awry and you fail to produce a liscense, but that never happens. Somebody will exploit the revenue potential and have their own cute little department with head honchos and hot receptionists, cool gear and rapid response animal control helicopters.... subsidised by the government, under pressure to actively pursue violations to justify their existence. Like the DEA.
Exactly. I mean, consider the fact that guns have to be registered and tracked. Now consider the fact that dogs many more people than guns do in any given year. This is despite the fact that there far, far more guns in the US than there are dogs (feel free to repeat this argument for cars). And it takes serious effort to make a dog dangerous -- years of systematic abuse. The idea of not tracking animals that are substantially MORE dangerous and are naturally aggressive is insane.
My bird-eating tarantula sheds her skin regularly.
I think the chip should perform a different function than tracking for dangerous animals. If one gets out, the zoo ought to have an "Abort and Destroy" button.
Every day I walk the streets, I have to be on my guard, not knowing when a komono dragon is going to bite off my leg, or an enraged ape is going to storm out of an alley and attack me, or an electric eel is going to zap me the next time I step in a puddle. I live in fear! FEAR I TELL YOU!! What is that buzzing sound? I hear it is too cold in Canada for Africanized honey bees, but YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL, DAMN IT!
It restores my faith in government that there is no threat too obscure, too irrelevant, or too laughable not to legislate and spend gobs of money on!
Seeing as the number of people killed by non-indigenous species every year has got to be, what, like 8 people?
...having fun and taking it to the local pawn shop to see what you can get for it?
rough call there....
I'm currently serving in the military in Japan, and microchips are actually required for pets that servicemembers import into the country when they PCS here. There's also a pretty extensive list of which animals are allowed and not allowed (some of the animals that are prohibited from being imported are easily bought right off base, though).
From what some of the NCOs in my unit tell me, one part of the whole quarantine process involves making sure that the animal has a chip, that the chip is working, and that the animal is not suffering from health problems due to the chip.
"Steve Ballmer would never go for it. Approach him with a microchip gun and he'd throw a chair at you. And then bury you. In chairs. He's done it before and he'll do it again."
Oscar Wilde
The natural conclusion to draw here is that every person will have a chip, since by far, human beings are the most dangerous animals on earth.
My cat is chipped, I had a choice: she can wear a collar with a tag (which I have to keep on her, make sure is on, etc, etc.), she can get a tattoo (which takes about an hour) or she could get chipped (takes about 2 minutes, she didn't seem to mind, neither did my parent's cats when they were done). Why is it such a stretch to require chipping for exotic pets? I know locally the entire chipping process with registration costs about $100 (one time cost).
Booooooring.
PETA's support (and, for that matter, many animal-focused organizations') support for microchipping generally is so that lost cats and dogs can be identified. And, much like a Diabetes bracelet, if an animal has an illness and needs medicine, that can be determined immediately. The Seeing-Eye, for one, likes to microchip their dogs because they are so valuable. It's a little bit of loss-protection so the owner can be found, but it's also a bit of theft-protection; as horrible as it sounds, stolen dog guides would be rather valuable as they are so well-trained. Although this story seems to lean toward microchipping as a way of identifying the owner in a case of neglect (if you left your alligator out to eat people, then you're in trouble, for instance). It's not a cruelty thing at all, then, for whatever reason it's done.
the post mentions "crocodiles" and "pythons" as dangerous pets - granted, we all know that crocodiles and alligators are different, but nonetheless, I couldn't help being reminded of this tasty tidbit of recent news - nice photo too.....
calling all destroyers
I'm a reptile owner with boas, pythons, a few corn snakes, and a texas rat snake. The boa constrictors will eventually get to be fairly large, about 7 feet for the male and 8 to 10 for the female. The pythons, Royals (also known as Ball Pythons) and Spotteds will be hard pressed to grow past 5 feet.
:)
The boas are the only ones I would consider to be a potential threat to other pets in the house, and that point is still years off. They are by far my most docile snakes, and only exhibit a feeding response when presented with rats. The smell of my cats or dog elicits no reaction from them whatsoever.
Ball Pythons are probably one of the fussiest snakes when it comes to feeding and they are of no danger to pets or people. They're very timid and there have been incidents of Balls being maimed or killed by live mice that were dropped into the enclosure when the snake wasn't hungry.
My town considers any snake over two feet long "bad", yet would take no action when our previous landlords pit bull came after my family five times. I find this somewhat ironic. Dogs are considerably more dangerous to people than any small or mid-size snake.
Large snakes such as burmese pythons, reticulated pythons, african rock pythons, and anacondas should never be handled solo, and bringing them out into the public is just plain nuts.
Burms typically have a docile temperament, but you don't want to be carrying a 10 foot long snake that gets a whiff of guinea pig off someone that walks by. The others listed there are known for their bad tempers, and the Rock python has been confirmed to have actually killed and eaten at least one person in its native habitat. Despite pictures of other snakes that are purported to have killed and eaten humans, neither I nor any of my friends in the herp community have found any documentary evidence to reinforce this. To the contrary, several of the pictures that make the e-mail rounds have turned out to be phonies.
Very very rarely, a large snake will kill it's owner. This is usually a mistaken feeding response. Like a monitor lizard, a snake that has taken the scent of prey has a one track mind. So if you're in the way of the food, or moving when the prey isn't it's a good way to get hit. The snake will then strike, hold and constrict. They don't crush bone, but actually tighten around the torso with each exhalation of breath until the victim asphyxiates. If the victim happens to be a person, the snake won't realize its error until too late.
On the other hand, these animals don't constrict as a matter of defense. Their strike is a fine deterrent. The strike of an adult burm or Rock has been described as feeling like being struck by a 12lb hammer.
That's why I'm content with my relatively small snakes
When I'm walking the dog at night, sometimes my female boa comes along for a ride on my arm, but they never see the street during the day.
I've been considering buying an Avid chip system to tag my snakes. But this is for personal security rather than legislated responsibility. When you get into the rarer color morphs it can get quite expensive, and whole collections have been stolen.
Anyway, I'm all for chipping pets, "dangerous" or not, but I really hate how the label gets stuck on some animals because of irrational fears. (Freaking out if you find a croc in your front hallway is not irrational. Feel free to scream and piss yourself. Me, I'll grab a camera and keep my distance.)
Amen, brother. If there is ONE fillet of meat in an Albertson's store with "mad cow" the government can track it from that fillet to the cut it came from to the truck that shipped it from the packing plant and from the packing plant back to the slaughterhouse and from the slaughterhouse to the feedlot and from the feedlot back to its exact stall and find the exact time and place of its birth, backtrace that to the family of cows it came from and isolate and quarantine them. Keep in mind, this is done in a matter of days, and the government can find that ONE cow out of MILLIONS. Yet we have 14 million illegal immigrants in this country, with another 8,000 coming across each day, and the government can't seem to find a single one of them? let's give every immigrant a cow, that will solve the issue!
There have been some attempts to chip people, but there is a pretty strong public dislike of it. There's a pretty strong business motivation for it, though -- lots of money at stake (look at e-voting, for instance). Putting chips in other things is a good way to get people used to the idea.
There have already been moves 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.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Walking my pet boa constictor:
"Hello!"
-"Eeek, thats a big snake!"
"Its ok, he doesn't bite"
-"he is wrapping himself around me"
"he likes you!"
-"he is crushing me!"
"just a friendly hug!"
Aaaah memories.
PETA and animal cruelty - and scientific exploitation of animals. A tough one. I personally see much of todays 'science' [mainly drug companies] as a money making factories not akin to home acid factories. So I do not condone the use of animals in experiments. However, what if we needed to use 10,000 live healthy ducks to try and avert the now inevitable H5N1 breakout in humans?
Hrm. That would be a good askslash - what to do in a H5N1 breakout tomorrow...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Give me a break. They call python "dangerous" and don't even mention C.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
From TFA: "take your pet snake for a 'walk'"
Wouldn't that be a slither?
This sig is false.
I see a lot of pet snake-loving, tree hugging individuals have already started picketing...
So before that happens let me just say this. I think an alligator is a scary predator (which would enjoy soft, pudgy geek meat like my own).
But scarier still, is the fact that a Burmese python can eat 6-foot-long (2-meter-long) American alligator.
Nuf Said.
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous? - Calvin
I think you are seriously underestimating the ability of a beauracracy to make life unpleasant for pepole. Hell, that's practically the _only_ thing beauracracies ever do. Believe me, if Japan's civil beauracracy wants people to be hassled, vast amounts of hassling will occur.
Sharks with friggin' laser beams on their heads!
So how is this in the "Funny" category, but the story on pillows being dangerous is not?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
From the hitcher episode of the Boosh - "he's got a rapist crab, a mackarel that exposes himself, a baboon that walks into lifts and presses all the floors, a swan that keys cars..."
He was quoted by one TV station as saying he was surprised the snake disappeared because it wasn't that kind of snake.
Guys always say that. It's a lame excuse.
All kidding aside, once you get all your animals chipped, its easier to accept criminals having them, then have your child carry a chip.. then embed it..
There may be no sinister intent here, but it does breed acceptance.
And of course you can take your snake for a walk.. Or rather a 'slither'. Never owned a big snake have ya?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Thank you yet again for bringing the matter of the flaming KOffice developer to our attention.
6 46636
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163348&cid=13
Such childish insults are not what I expected from an open source developer. Indeed, it does serve as a good example of what open source developers should not post online.
The complete lack of professionalism was disturbing, and it is unfortunate that both the KDE and KOffice projects had to suffer damaged reputations because of that single rogue developer.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I actually have one in my dog with information on how to contact my wife and I through the breeder we bought her through. dog catchers apparently have the gear to read them.
I take my "pet snake" for a "walk" every day
I reject your reality, and subsitute my own
I first misread the title as "Microchips Dangerous for Animals?" Sadly, that doesn't seem to be a consideration
I'm much more funny, interesting and insightful than the moderators think
You, me, and everyone else. That is "we". We are Slashdot, and we are the open source community. Together we can feel shame in knowing that a developer of our creed has shown such a lack of professionalism.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
you say the readers are quite pricey but a few hundred dollars really isn't a huge sum when you consider what it can save you ;)
when the RSPCA (substitute equivilent local institution if required) take in a stray animal if they can contact the owner immediately (which a microchip generally allows) it means they can immediately find out if the owner wants it back of if it needs to go up for re-homing.
on the other hand if they can't get in touch with the owner they have to hold the animal for a minimum time in case its claimed by the owner before they can put it up for re-homing.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wow. Not one, but two inflamatory opinions backed up with nothing for the reader to reference. Nothing I enjoy better than something that is presented as fact containing only opinion, and best yet, slashdotted to a 5:informative. You raters are not doing your farking yob, you twits. If it's not self supported, and it's not reference supported, it's a gob danged opinion, and opinions are only informative when they do not rely on assumption and speculation. Inconceivable.