Mission Rabies is reportedly collaborating with the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) and PAWS to track the movement and population of the city’s stray dogs with the help of a microchip implant.
The microchip is implanted in the neck area, and volunteers will be able to gather details about the dog by scanning its neck area with the help of an app on their mobiles.
The technology will also enable the volunteers to record the interactions between the stray dogs and people who own dogs.
The current method of cropping the ear of sterilised dogs does little more than identify them as having undergone the surgery.
A microchip implant is an identifying integrated circuit placed under the skin of an animal. The chip, about the size of a large grain of rice, uses passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) technolog. The tiny, coded markers implanted into individual animals allow assessment of growth rates, movement patterns, and survival patterns for many species in a manner more reliable than traditional approaches of externally marking animals for identification.
