<p>I have a project to recognize the footprint of animals. It is similar to facial recognition.<br>
There is a need to store footprint images in a database and compare them with images captured by camera.</p>

<p>What is the appropriate programming language to do this?</p>

I think the question is rather how you represent the data and determine likeness/sameness/distance measuring rather than an implementation language.
Lisp is a strong candidate, as is C/C++ - but really you are probably better off with whatever language you/your team knows best.
Again, figure out the data representation first.
Also - find another imaging/matching solution out there.  There are already ones for license plates, fingerprint, etc - and maybe just use that source.  The roblem is mostly solved...