What is it about?
A common sight on many Greek islands is feral (escaped or unattended) goats. They wander outside their pasture, unsupervised, and according to legislation in Greece municipal authorities are responsible for their capture. Rhodes municipality has established an innovative "Control & Management Program" for the feral goats designed to donate the meat produced from the captured animals to charitable organizations. The feral goats are captured by our teams in fenced pastures attracted by high-quality fodder offered. The innovative addition to the Program is the use of a digital platform where the citizens can actively support the efforts by submitting digital data (photos, coordinates) using a Smartphone, Tablet, or PC when they spot feral goats supporting municipal services and enhancing their efficiency.
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Photo by Person B1 on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The presence of feral animals poses road-safety risks and produces potentially severe agricultural, environmental, and property damages. We should not underestimate the acute tensions between the conflicting interests of farmers, animal breeders, and the tourism industry stakeholders. The platform offers digital inputs by the citizens and is a step forward in organizing a participatory process in feral goats management based on crowdsourcing techniques.
Perspectives
I hope this article sheds some light to a little researched issue of unattended animals in island regions. One could find common cases in Australia, the Galapagos, Hawaii and other Greek islands and I expect our research could be useful and replicable. Writing this article was an opportunity to get in touch with the practitioners and researchers internationally and present our innovative tools. I wish you find the article interesting and feel free to contact us for collaboration and new project ideas.
Aikaterini Tsakmakidou
Rhodes Municipality
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Innovative tools for the management of feral goats., October 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3494193.3494267.
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