Shanghai municipal government has planted 65,000 electronic ID chips into the city's pet dogs, Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.

Authorities can find the dogs ID number by using a chip-scanner and then inquire about their information via the Internet or short messages, including whether the dogs have received rabies shots.

The dogs' photo, species, gender, immunization condition and the dog owner's address are also shown under the ID numbers.

It's difficult to distinguish dogs by their appearance, which is a big problem in managing the city's dogs, said Wang You, the general manager of the company that produces the chips.

Shanghai has about 100,000 registered dogs and most of them have been implanted with the chip. When citizens register their dogs, vets will plant the chip into the dogs and conduct an annual check to update their information.

There is an urgent need to manage dogs more efficiently as more families begin to buy dogs as pets, and don't have them vaccinated.

In the past five months, rabies killed more people in China than all other notifiable infectious diseases, and continues to be a growing problem.

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

(Shanghai Daily October 26, 2006)