Use of RFID technology in animal tracking has been a practice
for the past years in countries around the world. RFID technology
is used to track both domestic (livestock and pets) and wild
animals, while there are efforts to standardize the methods and
the specific RFID tag technology used (Ntafis et al., 2008). Several
projects have been implemented worldwide, based on the
use of RFID technology for tracking animals and monitoring the
progress of a disease, such as the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) project for tracking captive deer and elk in
the U.S.A. based on the use of RFID tags in order to determine
how deer and elk contract chronic wasting disease (National
Animal Identification System (NAIS)). In the standardization field,
we can reference the case of AIM Global (RFID technology News
and Insights), which has developed a draft standard for RFID for
food animals to address growing concerns about the threat of
terrorist attacks and the recent outbreaks of both BSE and footand-
mouth disease in different parts of the world. As the use
of RFID technology is getting cheaper, the use of animal tagging
is increasingly spreading. The U.S. Department of Agriculture
has announced plans (USDA) for the universal tagging of livestock
in the U.S. with RFID by the year 2009. In Europe, the
EU conducted a large study from 1998 to 2001 called the IDEA
(Identification Electronique des Animaux) project, concerning electronic
identification of animals. The IDEA project (Ribó et al.,
2001) was prepared by the Directorate General for Agriculture
(DG Agri) with the technical coordination of the Joint Researc