Owners of electronically-tagged dogs who were under the impression that they and their pets could never be separated for long in the event that their pets strayed are in for a rude awakening.
Critics said yesterday the Council of Agriculture's (COA) initiative to mandate that all pet dogs should have identification chips injected into them is stumbling because of the simplest of problems: a number of different tag and scanner systems are in use simultaneously.
No one scanner can decode the information contained in all commercially available electronic tags, the COA admits.
PHOTO: CHU YU-PING, LIBERTY TIMES
Animal protection activists lashed out at the council yesterday for its failure to regulate and unify the tagging system.
"To guarantee pet identification, you would need a whole range of scanners, because the various brands of electronic tags available on the market can often only be decoded by that brand's scanner," said Yeh lih-seng (葉力森), a professor of veterinary medicine at National Taiwan University, at a press conference held by DPP legislator Shen Fu-hsiung (沈富雄).
"Despite being tagged, stray pets might never be reunited with their owners simply because scanners available at public shelters couldn't identify information contained on the implanted chip," said Shih Wu-hung (釋悟泓), head of the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST, 台灣社會研究會).
The COA mandated all dog owners in September 1999 to have their pets electronically tagged in an attempt to help increase the percentage of pets that are returned to their owner after being lost.
There are currently more than 800 pet registration centers in Taiwan that are equipped with the necessary facilities to implant chips, and as of May, around 450,000 dogs, or around 22.5 percent of the country's dog population, is believed to have been tagged electronically.
Animal protection activists pointed out that the COA's lax regulations governing electronic tagging had created room for dishonest tag makers to inflate profits -- in that they could deliberately manufacture tags that could be only sensed by their own brand of scanners.
This situation would leave pet owners with the fear they might never be reunited with stray pets, activists said, as public shelters were unlikely to be equipped with all necessary scanners to detect every tag on the market.
According to statistics from the Taipei City Government for March, 20 percent of the electronically tagged dogs sent to public shelters needlessly died of disease during their extended stay there, because the shelters were unable to decode the implanted chips.
Some dog owners had gone as far as to have their animals implanted with several different brands of electronic tags, but activists said that even this could not guarantee that a pet would be returned in the event of its loss.
According to a recent survey by EAST, half of Taiwan's 61 public animal shelters are not even equipped with a single scanner.
"Had the COA regulated the electronic tagging system at the beginning of its initiative, the situation would not be such chaotic now," Shih said, adding that activists had at the time called upon the council to implement ISO-standard code -- commonly used in other countries -- in its policy.
COA officials attending the press conference admitted that the situation was now out of control, and that officials at public shelters were being forced to buy different brands of scanners -- each costing more than NT$30,000.
"We will communicate with tag manufacturers to regulate the code contained on the chips. In addition, we are figuring out how to decode chips made by `dishonest' manufacturers," said Wang Chung-shu (王忠恕), an official at the COA's Animal Industry Department.
Wang said that COA would also take activists' suggestions into account when proposing future regulations for electronic tagging.
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