24 Hours ago our family pet, a Seal Pointed Birman cat went missing. Besides all the frantic activities being done to try and find him, there is also a fair share of finger pointing and incrimination but I’m thinking… “What can we do to prevent this happening again?“.
The answer that springs to mind is…
Fit A Satellite Tracking Device
To The Cat
Now I don’t mean something akin to what you see on TV on those wildlife documentaries from Sir David Attenborough or his peers. It would look a bit silly with one of those huge radio collars fitted around the neck of such a small pet, and besides that technology is a bit rustic to say the least.
No, I’m going for something we already have. A technology that is in everybody’s hands, literally.
Your mobile phone!
‘Smart phones’ of today come standard with geo positioning features which basically works off a triangulation method of your signal to the three nearest transmission masts. What this means is that, so long as you are within a networked coverage area for your mobile phone, your exact location is attainable by others.
And all it takes is a little SIM card! Now that’s a lot smaller than one of those radio collars.
But it gets better.
All domestic pets (dogs and cats in particular) must be ‘micro chipped’ and registered. It’s a simple procedure and has been done for ages. The aim being, should the animal be lost and subsequently turned in to the authorities, they have a method of finding the rightful owner simply by scanning the micro chip and entering the info into their databases.
Now imagine we include a snippet of the SIM card electronics into that micro chip…!
This way we don’t have to wait for the animal to be found and handed in (sometimes this doesn’t happen as the pet is kept / stolen) but rather we can track the animal real time. But all that tracking equipment is a specialist subject you might say but again you’d be wrong.
This technology is already available in our smart phones. A simple app and it’ll track another SIM’s position easily.
So imagine that, the cat goes missing and instead of hours and days and possibly months of misery, you simply nip inside and get your phone, bring up the app and let the phone’s network coverage work it’s triangulation magic and pinpoint the other phone (or in our case – our cat and it’s micro chip).
It sounds fantastic but where’s the catch? Why haven’t we done it yet?
Well there’s always the question of the big telco’s and money. The SIM cards are their baby and they’ll be wanting some revenue if we all have SIM cards in our pets. Perhaps the governments should step in and legislate, forcing the telco’s to free up the technology in the interests of saving millions in operating animal pounds?
I won’t be holding my breath on this one. In the meantime I shall continue to rely on good old fashion neighborly customs and hope that somebody rings me to say they’ve found my cat.
Tags: animal, satellite tracking