Pet owners will have to microchip or tattoo their cats and dogs for a fee instead of just having a collar with an ID tag. Before the end of 2019, a relevant draft law might be submitted to the Russian State Duma, Izvestia daily reports with a reference to a representative of the Duma and the Ministry of Agriculture.
If the draft law is adopted, it will make microchipping dogs and cats that live in apartments mandatory. It might be either a microchip implant or a tattoo with a unique code. All data will be then submitted to the Federal State Veterinary Information System, which will keep record of all pets.
It is still being discussed whether the procedure will be free of charge (probably it will). However, it is not clear who will finance such a large-scale project: microchipping currently costs some RUR 1K ($16) and more, at least in Moscow. Moreover, in addition to house pets, the law suggests that agricultural animals, such as cows and sheep, and even fish and bees should be marked too.
In the future, microchipping can become something ordinary for people as well. This would be a much more complex device, of course, which will function as a bank card, travel card or a passport. Pro-rector of Tomsk University Konstantin Belyakov had such a microchip implanted as an experiment, while technology entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk has recently presented an AI microchip that can be implanted into people’s brains thus connecting them to the computer.