Anti-Cattle Rustling Device for Local Community

Cattle rustling has become a threat and a major crime in Nigeria recently. To minimize this, there is a need to ensure cattle safety and provide substantial security when rearing cattle both in ranches and open fields. This necessitates the need to deploy technology to attenuate cattle rustling. This study developed and tested an animal tracking device using the Internet of Things (IoT). The developed system consists of three units that were interfaced together. These units are the GPS Tracker (made up of the microcontroller, ATtiny chips©, ATMega328©, etc.), the Mobile Application, and the Database unit. The developed animal tracker was tested and the results showed that the constructed tracker is equivalent to the standard GPS and adds more information about cattle location, breed, color, weight, etc. The developed GPS tracker is a long-time security and monitoring aid that will be used to eradicate cattle rustling in Nigeria and identify cattle and other information which enables easy identification of cattle when lost. The addition of extra features such as location history was also implemented to improve the overall user experience.