Losing your pet can be a traumatic and even tragic event. Fortunately, conscientious pet owners are aware of this danger and they provide their pets with collars and ID tags with the hope of ensuring a speedy reunion. Sadly, collars and ID tags are not foolproof. Collars can break or fall-off, leaving your beloved pet as one of the countless, unidentified lost strays at the animal shelter. As a veterinarian who has worked at various animal shelters for nearly seven years, I have witnessed this sad scenario replayed day after day, and I have come to realize that the true tragedy is the fact it can easily be prevented with the use of microchips.

Microchips are implantable computer chips that encode a unique identification number to help reunite you with your lost pet. They are no bigger than a grain of rice and they are placed under your pet’s skin with a needle and syringe, not much differently than a routine vaccine. Unlike collars and ID tags, they can never break or fall-off. They work by receiving a radio signal from a scanner and transmitting the encoded chip identification number back to the scanner. With the chip identification number in hand, the vital contact information is only a phone call away.

There are two companies that make microchips in the United States: AVID and HomeAgain. Both work on the same frequency of 125 kHz, but only universal scanners, like the type used by animal shelters, can directly read the chip identification number encoded by either chip. So what happens if your lost pet has an AVID microchip, and after being found by a helpful neighbor it gets taken to a veterinary clinic that uses the HomeAgain system (or vice-versa)? Since they operate on the same radio frequency, the scanner will detect the presence of the chip, and it though it cannot read the encoded identification number, it identifies the lost animal as being someone’s lost pet.