Shanghai government has tagged 65,000 pet dogs with electronic identity (ID) chips, Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday.

The information stored in the chips – including owners' details and immunization records - can be accessed with a chip-scanner.

Each dog is given an ID number with information such as the dog's photo, species, and gender that correspond to that ID number.

As to why the city decided to implement the ID tagging system, Wang You, the general manager of the company that produces the chips, said: "It's difficult to distinguish dogs by their appearance, which is a big problem in managing the city's dogs."

Shanghai has about 100,000 registered dogs and the plan is to tag every one of them. Further, the information on the chip will be updated annually.

There is an urgent need to manage dogs more efficiently as more families are buying dogs as pets without first having them vaccinated.

In the past five months alone, there were more actual reports of deaths caused by rabies than other infectious diseases.

In the first nine months of this year, the Ministry of Health received reports of a total of 2,254 rabies cases nationwide, up 29.69 percent from the same period last year.

(Shanghai Daily October 26, 2006)