A flea bitten dog is going to fly back to her home. She’ll be reunited with her owners after nine years after she disappeared. Yeah this is one of the many happy ending stories where a lost dog was tracked down to its owners because it was micro-chipped! The owners had micro-chipped Muffy nine years back. When RSPCA Melbourne checked the microchip ID of the dog sleeping on tattered piece of cardboard with the database, they traced the owners back to Brisbane. So sweet na!! (A little girly expression commonly used by XX-es would be “Choo Chweet”. Pardon me I’m being bogged down by Kyle-XY fever these days).
The Animal Welfare Board of India has made it mandatory for the pet owners to get their pets registered. But the tag carried by the pets doesn’t seem to fare well when it comes to tracking down your lost puppy. And here are the opportunistic marketers with another product: Microchip for the puppies. And why wouldn’t they? There are people who will buy just anything for their pets. I need not to talk about any other place; my place is good enough to accentuate my belief. Although Cheeku (yeah that’s my pet’s name) has not been lucky enough to enjoy such high tech products, but for sure he has got larger assortment of soaps & shampoos than all of us XY-es (except if you are a metro sexual shelling out half of your salary on cosmetics).
Pets so easily get gelled with your family. They learn things as the babies do, they like things that we like (atleast Cheeku loves “Rajma Chawal” & corn). Probably they are no more pets for a family; they are members, family members. I reckon that explains why my sister ties a Rakhi to Cheeku every Rakshabandhan.
No wonder all the usual consumer behavior fundas do seem to fit in well when we consider shopping for pets. It’s much very similar to a mom buying the products for the babies. “Which one should I buy? There are all sorts of products for all sorts of shapes n sizes; Pomeranians, poodle, dash hounds, Labradors. This neck-collar will look nice on him”. Not to forget the peer pressure also coming into play: how can my neighbor’s dog has a better neck-collar than my dog? What will he think when he finds out that other dog has got better jacket than him? Poor dog, all he might be interested in is playing with the other dogs or wooing the cutest female dog in the society. This is even more apparent whenever I have visited veterinary hospital to get Cheeku Vaccinated. Everybody there seems to be claiming that my dog is the smartest by making him obey the orders: Tommy sit, Tommy come here, Tommy Shake hand (Remember har kutte ka naam tommy nahin hota. Read it as "not every dog is named Tommy". So never try this to a dog in owner’s absence).
Now Government has been pushing unique citizen ID project, it’s just a matter of time when your puppies will get be roaming here & there with microchips embedded in their body. It seems to be a rational step which might help us tackling the rabies which leads to 30,000 deaths in India every year, highest across the globe.
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