Interestingly enough, we now have better ways of proving ownership that weren't possible back then: Get your dog microchipped and tattooed if you haven't already. They're far better ways of proving ownership than feelings.
Also, if I were there, I'd have snuck a treat into the court room. It's far more foolproof if I'd been able to condition the dog to expect treats by coming to me in a few 20 minute vists.
Also, does anyone have suggestions for international pet databases? My country doesn't have a national database.
I don't see how a microchip (that a thief would have removed/replaced) helps prove ownership, and tattooing has been available for a long time.
A friend of a friend lost their cat once: it suddenly disappeared. Several years later they found it dead in a public place, but apparently well fed. It appears that someone else had adopted it, but they never even found out who, let alone how or why. I don't know how they identified the animal. Some people can identify animals from their appearance as easily as most people identify humans; some people cannot even identify humans very reliably.
Put lots of pictures of you and your pet on social media, perhaps, and summon an animal super-recogniser as an expert witness?
> I don't see how a microchip (that a thief would have removed/replaced) helps prove ownership...
A microchip (aka RFID tag) contains a unique serial number. An entry corresponding to this serial number is added to national databases that are easily searched by vets, shelters, and animal control.
It's nontrivial to remove a microchip (requires a vet to perform an X-ray and surgery). You're talking about removing a grain of rice that's buried somewhere within the dog's shoulders.
On the other hand, it's easy to transfer registration data (modifying the database entry) if you have the approval of the original owner.
At any vet worth their board certification, they would scan the chip and contact the named owner before performing this surgery.
Microchips are well known to be effective ownership proving tools, and their prevalence even without a matching tattoo is usually an effective theft deterrent. If you think you can demonstrate otherwise (notwithstanding anecdotes concerning lost/stolen unchipped pets), I'd love to hear it!
An RFID tag is an excellent way of labelling a furry animal, no doubt about it, and a national database administered by regulated and trustworthy professionals is an excellent way of making it possible to prove ownership, no doubt about that, either. However, as I see it, it's the database plus regulated professionals that's the essential ingredient here, not the particular way that labelling is implemented.
Though I introduced the thought myself, perhaps removing microchips is not all that relevant. If there was no reliable database and vets were all corrupt then you could have an animal with six RFID tags attached to it, and six people each claiming to be the owner of each of those tags, and how would that help anyone prove ownership?
Nevertheless, if one did want to remove an RFID tag, I'd hope there would be a better way of locating the thing than X-rays. It does, after all, contain a transponder and I seem to recall that when RFID tags were first proposed one of their advantages was supposed to be that you could use them to precisely locate things. If someone had attached an RFID tag to my property and I was worried that they wanted to do something nefarious, how would you recommend that I locate and remove/destroy that tag?
> Nevertheless, if one did want to remove an RFID tag, I'd hope there would be a better way of locating the thing than X-rays.
Ultrasound might be useful, too, especially for determining the depth of the tag, but most vets would reach for the radiograph. The ultrasound head will be right over top of the tag, which would make it difficult to mark the location and see what you're doing during surgery.
> It does, after all, contain a transponder and I seem to recall that when RFID tags were first proposed one of their advantages was supposed to be that you could use them to precisely locate things.*
RFID provides location tracking by being an easily scanned unique identifier, not by transmitting location data. You'd need to have a reader within a few inches of the tag to locate it, at which point your nefarious actor is fully in posession of the pet (just as they were when they implanted the tag). It could locate your animal as having last gone through a pet door in one direction or the other with a reader on each side of the gate, it can't put a dot on a map for a wardriving Cruella DeVille. Think permanent, easy-to-read barcode sticker, not GPS transmitter.
> If someone had attached an RFID tag to my property and I was worried that they wanted to do something nefarious, how would you recommend that I locate and remove/destroy that tag?
Bring your animal to your vet. They'll recognize you and your pet's history (you are up to date on your vaccinations and animal registration, correct?) and will be able to scan and see your microchip, as well as the new data. Then you can file a police report.
What if I'm worried that someone has attached an RFID tag to my car, my bicycle, or an item of clothing?
(The tags used in animals might only be readable at a range of a few inches, but: "Gen2 tags can have a read range of over 16 meters or 52 feet when using the full 4 Watt EIRP legally allowed on the readers by FCC and other global regulators"; "a model using a beam-steerable phased-array antenna can interrogate passive tags at a distance of 600 feet or more")
Reminds me of the time our cat got run over in the road in front of the house. Scooped the cat up, took it up to the house and told the wife. "Poor Kitty Kat, should have stayed out of the road." As we stood over the dead cat for a few moments, the real Kitty Kat walked up, sniffed the dead one, "hey, why y'all standing around a dead cat?" Hurray, our cat's not dead, but now I get to go bury a cat that wasn't mine.
Point is, meh, it might have been your friend's cat that they found.
Pictures are definitely helpful, but a microchip isn't the easiest thing to remove and, since they're meant to be permanent, asking a vet to remove one should certainly raise a few eyebrows — if not end with the vet looking up the owner's information.
Actually, as an immutable datastore, the blockchain is the perfect place to store ownership certificates. That's literally what crypto-currency is, a long auditable log of ownership certificates (unless you're complicating things with segwit).
You're addressing the technical problems without addressing the people problems.
Blockchain is as immutable as it's distributed. When a company (corporate structure) is running it, they will probably own all of the nodes.
A much more simple and legally strong solution would be to keep everything in a graph and hold backup copies in escrow.
I think that currency is one of the few applications that's inherently distributed enough to allow the blockchain application to work. It also requires large amounts of individuals controlling resources.
Plus, in this case, the value is not in the token of ownership, but in the actual ownership. Bitcoin and other currencies, the token IS the value. With a ledger of property ownership, the value is in the ownership of the property, not the ownership of the listed token.
Meaning, people wont be incentivized to use blockchain if a centralized database by the state that records ownership exists.
My point, btw, is not that "blockchain is bad". It's that "other things are usually better". Usually, being a key word.
You misunderstand, I meant a public blockchain. People have been using the bitcoin and ethereum blockchain to store proof of existence for ages now, see stamp.io
You could create an ethereum based registry fairly simply where people paid to be included. I'm definitely addressing both technical and people problems here.
Apart from that, I'm sorry, the practicalities of crypto-currency have been debated ad nauseum and I don't feel like arguing them today. :(
Would they be considered witnesses though? I'm honestly not sure whether the legal classification overlaps or not. I suppose that one doesn't necessarily have to be a witness to "take the witness stand" even if not, though.
Dogs can look guilty. And lie. So we probably can fMRI a dog to get a sense of if it can pass the McNaughton test ("would you have done it, if a policeman was watching")
Also, if I were there, I'd have snuck a treat into the court room. It's far more foolproof if I'd been able to condition the dog to expect treats by coming to me in a few 20 minute vists.
Also, does anyone have suggestions for international pet databases? My country doesn't have a national database.