## 2 Animal Identification and Tracking  
The concept of livestock tracking has been around for some time now. Global positioning system (GPS) and wireless technologies have over the years been used for animal tracking using technologies such as the radio frequency identification (RFID) tags [4] and GPS satellite collars [5,6]. Between 1998 and 2001, one million animals were electronically identified using ear tags, the stomach bolus, and the injectable transponders in the European commission through the Identification Electronique des Animaux (IDEA) project [7]. The Ministry of Agriculture in Botswana uses the Livestock Identification Trace-back System (LITS), an RFID based animal identification technology to capture data on individual cattle, and stores this data in a central database [8]. LITS uses rumen boluses with embedded RFID microchips [9] to trace animals with each rumen bolus coded with the owner's name, a personal identification number, the sex of the animal, the hide color of the animal and the location of the animal. This data is then uploaded to an extension officers' computer and stored on a central database in the capital city of Botswana, Gaborone. The rumen bolus is a small plastic or ceramic capsule which rests at the rumen and is inserted down the throat of an animal using a special administration tool. For the last few years WSN has been used in monitoring the health of dairy cows [10, 11, 12]. A multi-year study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia, have been investigating the use of WSN for automated livestock monitoring and control as cattle sensor networks [13]. Most of these cases have used collar mounted sensory devices for implementing WSN in animal management such as the famous applications in the ZebraNet [14] and cattle sensor networks [13, 14, 15] or positioned sensors in the Great Duck Island [16]. An experiment was conducted on an implicit routing protocol (IRP) to be used in a cost effective WSN for monitoring the health of dairy cows [17]. The IRP was to mitigate the effects of animal mobility on the network performance which affects real-time data reporting through high packet loss and long delay in WSN. However, all of these experiments were done in constrained environments which are different from tracking cattle in case of cattle rustling or theft in terms of the sensor nodes used, distance travelled by the animals, and animal movements. Several readymade collars and receivers from different manufacturers are available off the shelf, but with the nature of cattle rustling, a mounted device on an animal cannot be used as it can be removed and left on the ground and the animal moved to a different location. It could also be removed and placed by the rustlers in a different location and direction to lure the recovery team away from the rustlers' track. One way to track the animals as they move would be to use the proposed approach to tracking moving targets using video sensors connected to strategically deployed nodes [18]. The main challenge with use of the video sensors is that it requires them to be placed in strategic positions in a presumed path the cattle rustlers would use as they move with the animals. However, in cattle rustling, the direction and the paths taken by the raiders are not well defined nor predefined. Animal identification is the combination and linking of the identification and registration of an animal individually with a unique identifier [19]. Identification of the animal without trackinglive animals is counterproductive. A traceability study done in Kenya by [20] indicated that when moving cows from Garisa to Kwale, one of the registered animals was received in Malindi (one of the checkpoints) but did not reach the intended final destination (Kwale) after it strayed. This indicates that even though the animal had the required identification rumen bolus, its location could not be identified. Tracking is the capacity to isolate the current estimated location of an animal using the identifying device.