Not content with wiring garbage bins to monitor how much waste British families produce, now officials in the U.K. want have another plan that has privacy advocates’ knickers in a twist: They want to force dog owners to microchip their pets and buy insurance in an effort to crack down on canine aggression.
Britain has nearly 8 million dogs. Weapons are tightly controlled in the U.K., which seems to have a problem with dogs trained to inflict harms on people to make up for it.
Making dog owners buy insurance will sanction all of them — even those who are law-abiding citizens — while criminals will continue to do what they do and simply ignore the law.
“But I don’t think it will actually happen,” Big Brother Watch’s Alex Deane wrote on the privacy advocacy group’s website. “You can tax us to high heaven, you can authorise bullying policemen to push us from pillar to post – people in this country just take it. But any man who messes with the great British pet is a fool – they simply won’t manage to enforce this one.”
As for the microchips — a standard method of tracking beloved pets when the become lost — theier compulsory use has the potential to lead to bigger problems than occasional dog attacks.
“While the question of how to reduce the number of stray dogs on Britain’s streets is pressing, this solution is yet another example of the state’s desire to accrue ever more information on its citizens (and their pets),” wrote Big Brother Watch’s Dylan Sharpe. “Databases, such as the one proposed, give countless people in local authorities easy access to very personal data; which is in itself often far more dangerous than the initial problem.”
