Photograph by Flickr user Brew Ha Ha

The government of Kyrgyzstan has developed a draft law on animal identification, says AKIpress on the 29 of January 2010.  At a meeting of Parliament Kyrgyz First Vice-Prime-Minister Akylbek Japarov stated that according to the proposed statute a unified system of animal identification was planned to be created in Kyrgyzstan (full text of the proposal in the Russian language ).

According to the proposal, all animals should get an individual or group ID (differences in ID will be made according to type of animal are also proposed by statute) and special documents should be provided for them.  The Registan‘s Noah quoted Akylbek Japarov regarding this proposal:

We’re prepared to make a passport for every single sheep. That is, from birth to the slaughterhouse you can learn its entire genealogy from a laser scan.

Japarov’s remark has quickly headlined news websites around the world, for example ‘Kyrgyz sheep will be given passports’ or ‘Passports and insurance can be given to each Kyrgyz sheep’.   But is the proposal really a silly idea?

The main objectives of the statute are: to provide state supervision of the movement of animals in Kyrgyz territory, to get prompt information on the livestock in order to increase its productivity, improve management, and forecast market livestock products, and to plan and conduct preventative veterinary measures.  Sounds good to me.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of critics, not to mention the usual train of unanswered questions, such as whether it is the most important and actual problem for our country at present, or whether it is a good idea to spend federal money on it, or how long time and how much money it will require to make our bureaucracy fulfill this bill efficiently, etc.  Let’s not even get into the topic of costs!

Criticisms, both positive and negative, can be found on the Diesel forum.  For example:

Taxper: ‘There is no other problem except counting the sheep and giving them passports…’

PPetro: ‘heh.. They can’t make passports even for people; it was said that there would not be passports until March.’

N-style Concept: ‘The main point here is an opportunity for getting new taxes.’

And, of course, Noah, the original observer, has this to say:

What I love about this is that you take a good idea and then run it through the Soviet institutional methodology for implementing it in a way that appears to use ‘high technology’ [but] is also complicated… and would require a large bureaucracy to oversee.