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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'?"
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.
I read that as MOD chips for pets. I was so excited, but now...
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
"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!"
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.
Does "Dangerous Animals" include US Navy dolphins with toxic dart guns?
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"
That flashloop is older than prostitution.
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.
My bird-eating tarantula sheds her skin regularly.
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?
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.)
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.