Animal Health Solution - a Henry Schein Animal Health magazine for veterinary professionals
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1412519
10 Covetrus | 855.724.3461 | northamerica.covetrus.com Happy reunions How 21st century microchip technology helps more lost pets find their way home Raising awareness, reuniting families One in three family pets will get lost, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). When a pet is lost or stolen, a microchip can greatly increase the likelihood that the dog or cat will return home. In fact, microchipped dogs are twice as likely to be reunited with their owners. Microchipped cats are returned 20 times more often. But only 60 percent of microchips are ever properly registered with the owner's information. And of those that are, there's often missing or incorrect data, which is a common reason why so many microchipped pets never find their way home. "Without an up-to-date registration, there's no way to tie the pet back to the family. It's a real challenge," said Chance White, CEO of Save This Life Microchip and Pet Recovery System. To encourage owners to microchip their pets and keep registration information up to date, the AVMA and the American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) team up every August 15th to promote National Check the Chip Day. This year's event is especially important, because of the spike in pet adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these new pet owners schedule their first visits with veterinarians, it is a prime opportunity to microchip these pets and register the owner's information. By doing so, veterinarians can reinforce that microchipping is a standard of care for first-time, new client visits. But with traditional microchipping, there's still the issue of inaccurate or missing owner information in the registry. Without that information, a happy reunion may never occur. What can veterinarians and pet owners do to reverse this trend and bring more owners and pets back together? To get to the answer, let's start by looking at the problems associated with traditional microchip systems. Then, we'll reveal a new way to overcome these challenges. The challenge with traditional microchipping Standard pet recovery systems require that the microchip number be read by a scanner, or the pet finder must locate the number on the pet's ID tag and make a phone call. The operator then attempts to connect the pet finder with the owner. There are many opportunities for this approach to fall short, such as: • Illegible ID tags, or tags that don't include the microchip number at all, • Inability for the phone operator to connect the finder with the owner, • The need for an exhaustive search through multiple chip registries to find the correct one, and • Issues with finding the pet owner in the correct database because of missing, dated or incomplete information— or if the owner has failed to pay the annual fee and the registration has expired. There's another shortcoming as well: there's no system for the pet owner to proactively reach out to a professional organization that specializes in finding lost and stolen pets. Instead, the pet owner has to wait for the phone to ring in the hope that someone finds the animal and then either has the chip scanned or makes a call if the microchip number is on the ID tag. Yet another issue with traditional microchip systems forces veterinarians to ask a difficult question…