Having your companion animal wear identification is important for minimizing the chances of theft or permanent loss. Lost or stolen pets can end up in research laboratories. The likelihood of this happening is remote, and in fact decreasing these days, but an animal who is easily identified is less likely to suffer this fate. An identification tag is a lost pet's ticket home. Equipping your animal with identification won't guarantee that he or she won't fall into the wrong hands, but it can help.
 Insure Animal Safety
Although a collar with an identification tag is still the first line of defense, some argue that tattoos or even microchip implants are the best way to ensure the safety of your companion animal. Concerned laboratory animal facilities will look for tattoos and microchips and make an effort to track down the animal's guardian.
Your pet needs your care and protection. That's why it's so important to keep a collar and identification tags with your name, a local contact number, and an out-of-town friend's or relative's number on your dog or cat at all times. Fortunately, a new technology now offers another tool to help reunite lost pets and their people.
Chips are Panted Under the Skin
Microchips can be implanted just under the skin of dogs and cats. Veterinary, animal control, animal shelter, and local humane society professionals can then use handheld scanners—just like those used in market checkout lines—to "read" the chips implanted in animals found wandering unsupervised. The microchip provides a unique code for the pet that can then be matched against an identification database.
A Chip Lasts 25 Years
Microchips are made to work throughout the lifetime of a pet—a chip typically lasts at least 25 years. They don't ever need replacing and can't be lost. But, as with most new technologies, microchipping isn't without problems. Chief among these is that manufacturers since late 2003 have used incompatible technologies.
Universal MicroChips
 Because of this some scanners can only recognize microchips made by their own manufacturers. Without a universal scanner for all types of microchips, shelter staff would have to scan an animal—who may be fearful and difficult to handle—more than once with each manufacturer's scanner. Even more problematic, not all companies provide their scanners free to shelters and other agencies, which often can't afford to buy different scanners from different manufacturers.
First, don't let scanner incompatibility stop you from microchipping your pet. But check with your local shelter or animal control agency staff to make sure the type of microchip your veterinarian will implant—or the type of chip your pet already has—can be read by the scanners they use. Visit www.pets911.com or check your local telephone listings to find the appropriate agencies. If they can't read the chip, ask the microchip manufacturer to send them at least one scanner free of charge. And please don't rely exclusively on microchips to protect your pet. In the event of accidental separation, proper identification tags are your pet's first ticket home.
Microchips provide an important extra level of protection in case your pet loses his or her collar and tags. Providing your dog or cat with both tags and a microchip can help ensure a happy reunion if the unthinkable happens and your companion gets lost.
Chip Size
An identification microchip, along with the needle used to implant it, sits alongside a quarter for scale. A hand-held scanner detects and decodes the ID data from the chip. The numbers will correlate to a specific pet's identity in a database. |
