advertised on the various lost pet sites, like PawBoost.
Most local animal control officers carry scanners and their home office has even better ones.
I rescued a poor stray, older dog, recently during some cold wet rain.
The animal control officer ran his wand over the poor critter after we got him into a cage box on the truck.
The officer knew that the poor critter had a scan/microchip. His scan didn’t let us know the dog’s owner, tele and home address.
At the office, they located the dog’s masters via a better chip reader. The owners picked up the dog in less than a hour.
The officer said if I hadn’t put towels around the lost dog and called animal control, the dog would not have recovered. It was cold and damp that morning.
We still have no idea. How a blind dog could end up about a mile away from its home and not be killed by traffic. He crossed at least 3 busy roads.
I think it’s for locally lost animals and that the only people who regularly check them is animal control and maybe other animal shelters.
If your dog keeps running away, there is a good chance that your dog doesn’t like you....
I’m not a vet, but help operate a no-kill shelter. We scan cats and dogs of unknown provenance, and occasionally find a chip. We also look for spay-neuter tattoos, which can clue us in to where an animal was fixed, which can lead to the SN vet remembering the animal. Tracking down an owner from chip data is more trouble than you might think. Some companies are defunct. Often the owner data is obsolete.
Often the pets have been passed along to new owners (or variously abandoned, surrendered to shelters, etc.) Every now and then the research, calls, etc. pay off and a bereft owner is reunited with their pet. The process can also drag you into domestic disputes and ethical issues.
The point here is that it often takes more than a quick scan and a phone call. Shelters aren’t legally required to make more than a cursory effort to find owners of strays, but doing this sort of thing is part of our mission.
Vets generally are in the making money business (that’s not a criticism), not the spending time finding owners business. They will perform scans and do searches if a client or shelter asks them to, but I doubt many do this on every animal hoping to find some trouble.
I think microchips are a good idea for pet animals. They not only help you find the pet if it’s lost, they ALSO put out an APB if you report your pet lost. You have to keep whatever company the chip is registered to updated as to your address and contact info.
Therefore, if you report your pet lost this database will upload that to a NATIONAL notification system. If the pet is ever found - dead or alive - you will be notified, assuming it is picked up by Animal Control or taken to a vet or a shelter.
That doesn’t mean that if someone steals your pet and takes it to a veterinarian that the vet will scan for a microchip; HOWEVER, they will ask where you got the pet. If the thief says “from a shelter” or “from my neighbor” or whatever, the vet may take it upon him/herself to do a scan. (When me and Mr K - not the one on this forum - took in a stray and took him to the vet, we did report that he was a stray and the vet told us the cat had no microchip, so he was being conscientious. Your results may vary.)
“Let’s now say that a vet does scan the pet, perhaps because a new chip was requested by the new “owner,” and discovers the old chip, the one I had placed in the pet. Is the vet obligated to notify the recording organization that the pet has been found, or just to tell the new claimant about the finding?”
The vet may not be obligated to inform, but just in the act of looking it up, he has put an alert into the system. The staff at “petfinders” or whatever are rewarded handsomely for getting a pet back with his rightful owners, so even if the vet doesn’t care, the tracking service will.
If there are plenty of ground squirrels, mice, and birds, it’s doubtful a coyote or owl will hang around just looking for cats - coyotes are opportunistic and most foxes and owls will go after smaller prey.
If someone is taking cats, you and your neighbors should sort of sneakily look around for pit bull breeders. They will take pet animals, cats and dogs, and they don’t bother scanning. You can report pit bull breeders to law enforcement, and you should. They ALWAYS kidnap pet animals to use for training. They are mean to the dogs, too.
I hope this helps.
(Note: I do not think microchips are a good idea for people except maybe convicted child molesters and so on. But people can take their chips out, so it’s not going to help much in that case, either.)
I looked it up but the internet would not give me an answer, “Are pet ID chips found in owl pellets?”
Any Chinese restaurants in your area?
one of my best friends is a vet
at her clinic, they only scan if requested to do so
(From my friend who is a small animal vet.)
-—”None of the Vet practices I worked for scanned for chips as a regular checkup. We didn’t scan in my practice. Only if someone brings in a stray. The shelters and animal control will scan them and call the last registered person.”
That’s what he said at least. I have never had any of my animals scanned in all the years of going to a vet. Most vets know their customers and their pets so I doubt it is common anywhere.
When you register your dog’s microchip, enter all relevant contact information. It’s a good idea to include both landline and cell phone numbers for you and anyone else in your household who is responsible for ownership. You don’t want to miss a call telling you that your canine companion has been found. Remember to keep your contact information up to date with the registry, too.
Happened to me with an adopted dog. Cops picked her up as a stray and slapped her in a kennel. The vet that ran the kennel wanded her and failed to find the chip (they float sometimes). My vet, on the other hand, found the chip on her initial wellness visit. He reported the dog, they tracked down the original owner who, fortunately for us, declined to claim the dog.
No chips for my pets, the same as it is for me and mine.