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Last updated 7/7/07

Microchipping, ID tags, or Tatoos...

 How Do You Find Your Lost Pet?

A well-fitted collar with a current ID tag is arguably a pet's best chance at coming home again if lost, but it's not a perfect system -- tags fall off or aren't kept updated.  Pet thieves toss collars the second they grab an animal.  Tatoos give permanent means of identification but do not provide a way for a person to locate the owner of a lost dog.  For these reasons and more, animal shelters have long been recommending high-tech microchips as a complement to the low-tech collar and tag.

About the size of a grain of rice, a microchip can be implanted beneath the skin over an animal's shoulder blades.  Once in place, the number on the chip can be read with a hand-held scanner, and that number is matched with contact information for the pet's owner.  Since microchips gained widespread acceptance in the '90s, millions of animals have been chipped. Even more important, hundreds of thousands of pets have been reunited with their families.

The controversy --

"Both recovery systems get a thousand calls a day," said Dr. Dan Knox, the veterinarian in charge of the companion-animal program of microchip manufacturer AVID. "Microchips work."

Unless they don't.

The recent introduction into the United States of a microchip that operates on a different frequency from the ones already in use has put a glitch into the nation's microchip system, with the potential for placing thousands of pets at risk if not resolved. 

The microchip muddle began around 2005 when Banfield-The Pet Hospital (the veterinary presence inside the retail giant Petsmart) started selling a chip that operates on a frequency recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and is widely used outside of the United States.

There's debate over whether the U.S. should adopt international microchip standards -- it has been characterized as an issue similar to the country's lack of interest in adopting a metric system of measurement. But one issue isn't up for argument: Shelters using the current "universal" scanner can't read an ISO chip.

Citing concerns over the incompatibility issue, Banfield stopped its microchip program, but not before 26,000 animals were chipped. Banfield has since started advocating for a scanner that reads all chips, while the players already in the game, such as AVID, advocate an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach -- no ISO chip, no problem.

AVID is one of two major players in the U.S. market, with information on 18 million animals in its database. The other major microchip system, Companion Animal Recovery (CAR), is administered through the American Kennel Club using a microchip made by Schering-Plough. CAR has information on more than 2.7 million animals in its system.

In the nation's shelters, the people on the front lines just want a system they can work with to reunite animals with their families.

"The shelter community does not deserve to take the blame for putting an animal to death after missing a chip while corporate people play games," says John Snyder of the Humane Society of the United States and a member of the Coalition for Reuniting Pets and Families. "We say, 'OK, keep your AVID chip, keep your Schering-Plough chip -- heck, bring in an ISO chip. We don't care. We're looking for a universal scanner that can read them all.'"

For Snyder, the issue feels like a bad rerun. Feuding manufacturers and incompatible chips almost stopped the promising technology from getting off the ground in the first place. The problems were resolved when manufacturers decided to cooperate on a scanner than could read all chips then in use.

Whether the situation will be resolved similarly this time is still very much in the air.
 
What to do now....
Pets now carrying ISO microchips are probably best implanted with a second chip that can be read by scanners currently in use in the nation's shelters. (Although ISO scanners have been widely donated, shelter staffers are unlikely to take additional time to scan a second time for a less-common microchip.)

For information about microchips now in use, contact CAR (www.akccar.org; 800-252-7894) or AVID (www.avidid.com; 800-336-2843).

For information about the push to develop scanners than can read all microchips, ISO variety included, check out the Web site of the Coalition for Reuniting Pets and Families (www.readallchips.com).

Experts say it's essential for information on any microchipped pet to be kept current. Make it a priority for any change in contact information to be immediately updated with the microchip registry.