THE Shenzhen Municipal Urban Administration and Law Enforcement Bureau has been continuously improving smart technologies to facilitate dog-raising in the city in recent years. Due to the pandemic, the fourth Love Your Pet Dog Day was held online yesterday, where online pet education classes and a dog-themed film were unveiled to help citizens learn more about dog adoption and microchipping rules. The film was told from the perspective of a dog living in Shenzhen. It documented a dog’s physical and psychological changes after being implanted with a chip to show the impacts of microchipping a dog. The urban management authority also published photos and information of dogs waiting to be adopted and launched a discussion online where netizens can join in the event yesterday. As part of the city’s dog-raising management and service, Love Your Pet Dog Day has been held for four consecutive years since the event’s inception in 2019. In order to make pet dog management smarter and more meticulous, Shenzhen also built a dog-raising management service platform and applied technologies such as dog microchipping and nose print recognition to provide more convenience and promote civilized dog-raising among dog owners. An increasing number of Shenzhen’s dog owners have gotten their pets microchipped, after two years of pet microchipping campaign. Data from the city’s urban administration and law enforcement bureau showed that around 500 dogs with microchips were returned to their owners over the last two years. A dog owner, surnamed Wang, experienced an incredibly scary time after her fur baby ran away from her friends’ house and got lost in a mountain. Fortunately, her dog had a microchip implanted. “Less than two days after my dog got lost, I got a call from law enforcement officers, who told me that my dog was found and received by an animal shelter. The officers identified it using the information its chip contains,” Wang said. Wang had got her dog microchipped for free in the community during the campaign. “Microchipping has a lot of benefits. It helps to prevent dogs from straying, particularly during the mating season.” Another dog owner surnamed Xu who lives in Longgang District said that his dog disappeared when playing in a yard at his studio this April. He and his colleagues failed to find the dog after searching for three days. When Xu was about to give up hope, he received a call from a pet hospital. The hospital told Xu that his dog was picked up by a citizen who later took the dog to the hospital for a bath. The hospital finally got in touch with Xu after scanning the microchip implanted in his dog’s body. (Wang Jingli, Xia Yuanjie) | 