Imagine a microchip with built in GPS/GPRS...

Why has nobody developed this yet?! I would pay anything up to a £1k for that kind of technology to be implanted in my dog.

Microchips are all very well and good but only if they're scanned when found.

Imagine your dog pelts out the front door... You open an app on your phone and it pinpoints exactly on a map where your dog is... probably the park.

I know they have GPS collars but if god forbid your dog was stolen, the first thing the thief is going to do is take off and destroy that collar.

The technology is out there! A site has made a GPS chip that you can put into your other halfs food that he ingests and then you can trace his every move (I'm not even joking ) so why can't they put it in a dog? Look how small they are nowadays:

I know one of my puppy owners who is into technology big style has been looking for one of these and it just hasn't happened yet, there is a market for it, I wish I was of the brainpower to be able to go out there and do it, so many people would buy it.

The big question has been the battery power needed to run it. My other half and his mate at work have come up with something that no one else has (I'd love to share their findings but I'm sworn to secrecy).

Well wasn't there something a while ago about implanting them in children, had an hysterical piccie in my head all of a sudden of standing (or attempting to) my girls next to a sort of bluetooth type of thing to be 'charged up' maybe they would glow a different colour when 'charged'

Hehe that is quite an image!

Funnily enough I was just talking to my mum about this and wondering why it hasn't been done yet

With all the dog thefts recently I think it'd be a good idea however on the other hand I would worry about the thief trying to dig it out of the dog

I did think this as well but the thief wouldn't know which dog was implanted and which wasn't and hopefully it would just put them off stealing all together.

Apparently some thieves have a way of finding the chip in a dog that is microchipped and digging it out, so really if someone is that determined then it wouldn't put them off. However if it was a gps enabled chip then you would have an idea where the dog was when the chip last signalled so that would give you a fighting chance of recovering your dog, so making it more difficult for someone to steal a dog fitted with that sort of chip because, Heaven Forbid!!! they may get caught

Yep, I am another one who has been looking for this kind of technology. I was more concerned about my cats whereabouts than my dogs though, as my cats were outdoors every day, and sadly I have experienced 2 disappearing without a trace, and lots of raised then dashed hopes through well meaning responders to lost pet posters and fliers.

Not that I wouldn't buy one for Cora too though; she has excellent recall, she is never left alone in the garden and I never leave her outside shops or cafes, but I am guilty of leaving her in the car when I pop into a shop for a few minutes, and with the rise in dog thefts these days I expect cars and homes are as likely to be broken into to steal pets as they are for anything else.

I've looked at all the GPS collars and tags on the market but the obvious flaw is that they can easily be lost. Particularly with cats, as I always use breakaway collars on them and am continually replacing them...while the gps tracker would give me an idea where a lost collar is, will it really lead me up a giant tree or into a thorny waste to the exact spot I where I will find it? Not to mention the 2nd obvious flaw that for either dog or cat, collars and tags are easily removed and disposed of.

I saw this thread last week and brought it up as a discussion topic on our walk at the weekend...My OH is astonished to learn that the microchips in our pets do not have GPS capabilities his little face was priceless!

Would it be safe to have GPS implanted...or not? What are the health implications of it?

And as for leaving the dogs in the car whilst popping into the shop...guilty of this but never again after watching the girl on Crufts tell the story of how she did that and came back to a smashed car window and no dogs We had done that with our two only a few hours before. I would be absolutely heartbroken