Our county Humane Society has installed a ‘community microchip scanner’ that is available 24/7. One of our cats has or had two microchips. Catmom thinks it’s Goo, but I can’t remember if it was Goo or Tonka. Anyway, I thought I’d pop over to Amazon to see what they have for chip readers.
I only looked at one, and it seemed all it did was display the chip’s serial/registration number. Are there chip readers that display the pet owners’ contact information?
I’m not certain that that info is actually contained on the microchip; my understanding is the chip simply has an ID number, and maybe which pet registry service it’s part of. A vet or a shelter would read that (using a scanner), and then look up the ID number on the pet registry’s website to access the owner’s contact information.
This is correct. The chip just has an ID number and that’s it. The vet doesn’t program them when they put them in your pet. They just record the number and send the actual registration info to the service that provided the chip.
Most RFID chips work the same way (door badges, container trackers, etc.). The chip only has a number. That’s it.
OK, that makes sense.
I just randomly went to the American Animal Hospital Association website, and it said:
While the tool will not return the pet owner information contained in the registries’ databases, it will identify which registries should be contacted when a lost pet is scanned and a microchip is found.
So it sounds like you find the chip’s number, then go to a tool where you can look it up, and the tool says, got to this other tool to look it up. In other words, don’t buy a scanner. If you find a stray animal, take it to a shelter.
A shelter or a vet, yeah. I suspect that, unless one is running a pet rescue (as my sister-in-law does), there’d be no reason why an individual would need a scanner.
People missing pets often post that their pet is chipped. It’s good to know when pets are chipped, but irrelevant to anyone who finds a pet.
For completeness’ sake, here’s the site where you enter a chip ID should you have access to a scanner…
AAHA Microchip Registry Lookup
I just happen to have an RFID reader that can scan pet chips, and after some wrestling, read my dog’s ID number. The AAHA site correctly identified the registry he’s associated with, and provided a link to the registry lookup page.
As I sort of suspected, if I enter the chip number, the site won’t give me any actual contact info. I believe that function is reserved for vets and shelters. A privacy issue, I’m sure.
I always thought that tidbit was meant to tell people who find the pet to not plan on keeping it for themselves; they (or the unwitting people they sell the pet to) will be found out the first time they bring their new animal to a vet.
Why irrelevant? If the finder’s wondering whether they’ve found the right yellow cat, and the missing one is chipped, but the cat they’ve found isn’t, then they know it’s not that cat.
That presumes they’ve already had the cat checked for a chip, of course; but they might have done that and seen the missing cat notice later.
That may be an added bonus, but the primary reason is so that the finder will know to take the pet to any vet or shelter so the owner can be reached.