Livestock registration key to ending rustling

Cattle rustling has left a trail of devastation in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid regions — which comprise 80 per cent of Kenya’s land mass and pastoralists who own 31 million livestock. Reactive strategies by Government to stamp out the menace have seen livestock robbers to temporarily vanish across porous borders and leave grieving widows and tearful orphans in their wake, raiding the villages when security agents leave.

Stolen herds have proved hard to trace despite the centuries-old marking practices involving hot iron branding, clan identification marks and tattooing. But as these have proved crude and largely ineffective, more modern, but also costlier methods such as bar coding, two-dimension symbology, radio frequency identification or scanning are used in the West.