KUCHING: The great Indian lawyer, Mahatma Gandhi once said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
In a world that sometimes feels chaotic, pets offer an unwavering source of love, companionship and support. The bond between a human and a furry friend is indescribable yet fascinating.
Whether they have fur, feathers, fur, scales, etc, pets hold a special place in the hearts of millions of people worldwide.
Pet owners commonly treat their beloved animals as if they were their offsprings. When their furry friends fall ill, significant sums of money are expended to ensure their recovery, including providing the finest nutrition to maintain their pets’ health.
Nevertheless, amidst the chaos of busy lives, this valuable information can sometimes get overlooked: ‘When is my pet’s next appointment?’ ‘What’s the feed I need to buy for my pet?’ ‘Where is my pet’s passport?’
This is where digital storage plays a crucial role in preserving essential data, including pet passports and medical records.
ePets
With the ever-growing advancement of technology, a local IT company, Waypoint developed an application to help bridge the gap between pet owners and veterinary services.
With the tagline, ‘Pet care made easy’, ePets is a free digital app soft-launched in September this year for pet owners to organize and merge information efficiently and easily. Throwing away physical and paper medical books because everything can be stored on the app.
Chief executive officer and founder of Waypoint, Cristian George Simion told New Sarawak Tribune during an interview at the Rabies in Borneo conference 2023 that the ePets was a way of advancing into a technologically advanced world even for pet owners and veterinaries.
“It’s also a way to move forward—offering comprehensive medication information, digital health records, veterinary services, pet passport, and so on for the public, rather than having everything on paper.
The app in general is made for users to be able to interact with veterinary services as well as provide easier access to all the information needed for veterinaries to do their operations and interact with the pet owners,” Simion said.
Additionally, the app can help any lost pets return to their owners more quickly due to the vast amount of information stored in the app.
Simion expressed that the application planned to collaborate with veterinary services through a subscription model, commencing initially in Sarawak and eventually expanding to encompass regions across Malaysia and internationally.
ePets + Sarawak Rabies App
“So, we want to integrate, ePets with the Sarawak Rabies application,” Simion said.
Being the newly appointed solution delivery partner by Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation (SDEC), this integration between ePets and the Sarawak Rabies app can create a greater database pool for veterinaries, pet owners, and the Department of Veterinary Services Sarawak (DVSS).
This incorporation between apps allows a greater synergy in protecting the furry friends in Sarawak.
“For example, if someone from the rabies application reports your pet as being found, they could also identify whose pet this is which will prevent a lot of put-to-sleep cases,” Simion said.
An artificial intelligence image recognition feature for pets is currently being developed by ePets to help efficiently reunite pet owners with their lost pets through a shared database.
The Sarawak Rabies app which was launched in 2022, functions as a system designed to track, monitor, and manage the deadly rabies infection in Sarawak.
The ePets and Sarawak Rabies app are accessible for download from both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, while the ePets app can also be obtained directly from the website: epets.com.my.
Rabies in Borneo 2023
The second Rabies in Borneo Conference, which happened from Oct 31 to Nov 1 at Imperial Hotel Kuching, brought together international like-minded experts, professionals, and stakeholders to discuss the ongoing rabies crisis in Sarawak and strategise ways to effectively stop the spread of rabies.
The conference was officially launched by Minister of Food Industry, Commodity and Regional Development Datuk Seri Dr Stephen Rundi Utom in which he envisioned the goal of zero rabies cases by 2025 during his speech.
Rundi added that the synergy between the public and the government could help achieve this goal to protect not only Sarawakians but our furry Sarawakian friends as well.
“This is 100 percent preventable, so what we need to do is to synergise all efforts together to protect dogs and the zoonotic effect on human beings,” Rundi said.
Since the outbreak of rabies in 2017, Sarawak has reported 72 human rabies cases. resulting in 63 human fatalities. Furthermore, there are over 100 animal rabies cases identified annually in Sarawak.
However, the state government remains committed to executing various measures, including mass vaccination, public awareness initiatives, surveillance and control efforts to reach zero rabies cases by 2025.
