RFID Tags harmful to dogs?

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine recently told me that the RFID tags that get put into dogs for tracking purposes can lead to increased risk of cancer / growths in dogs. Normally, I would tend to discount quotes like this from this guy. He can and does routinely lie with a completely straight face. It is also quite difficult to tell when he is lying and merely doesn’t know but thinks he knows.

So, simple enough question: Is there any data supporting this claim, or is my friend intentionally or not bamboozling me?

2

There isn’t enough evidence to support the claim that RF exposure is harmful to humans, let alone any other animal. Personally, worrying about it is right up there with being concerned about it raining marshmallows.

3

The RFID animal ID tags are passive, not emitting anything unless they receive a signal from a scanner. So from the perspective of electromagnetic exposure, they are far more innocuous than cell phones (for which health effects are generally considered dubious).

As for the effects of having a piece of plastic injected under the skin that’s about the size of a grain of rice? I can’t quote you data but I can opine that while it’s possible, it’s not likely, and if an animal did develop a growth, it would be hard to pinpoint the cause. Domestic pets can be prone to all sorts of growths and cancers as they age.

4

Actually, this is a controversial area (I am assuming that an RFID is the same thing as microchipping. If I am mistaken, please disregard my post).

See this. While it is certainly not definitive, I would say that microchipping pets should be done with caution.

5

The idea that a foreign substance implanted under the skin might cause cancer doesn’t strike me as particularly far-fetched.

6

Except that we’ve been implanting these materials in both humans and animals for many years with no compelling evidence of a problem.

7

This “scare” came out a few months ago. There is currently no evidence to prove a connection between malignant tumors and microchips in animals. There was only one reported case of an animal developing a tumor near the area where the microchip was planted, considering the amount of animals that get tumors and the amount that have microchips, both those overlapping at least once does not mean that the latter causes the former.

8

In cats, especially, stimulation of fibroblasts at an injection site can lead to tumor formation. Vaccine associated sarcoma information.

I have given many thousands of vaccines to cats, and have seen five sarcomas. I have implanted a few hundred microchips, but haven’t seen a tumor yet. As with most things in life, it is a matter of comparing risk vs reward.

9

Yeah, comparing the number of microchip-coincident tumors you’ve seen (zero, you say) to the number of lost dogs you must have seen (you don’t say, but we can guess it’s “lots”) is illuminating.

Lost dogs = huge nationwide problem.

Microchip-induced tumors = so few as to present difficulty establishing cause.

Sailboat