02/16/2023
You asked.... here's the answer!
A question we get a lot is why does a pet need to be scanned by animal control?
Here is the answer. Or we should say, answers.
Government shelters are privy to more information on microchip data than private citizens or even vet clinics. When a citizen has an animal scanned, microchip companies will often not provide contact info of the owner for privacy reasons. Other times, they will state it was not registered. If you take to a veterinary clinic, they will often provide more information to them including the person's name (if available) so the staff can contact (but not for distribution to the finder). If the chip is not registered, they are often at a standstill.
Guess what? We can go extra steps to try to find the owner. As a Government facility, many chip companies will provide us with secondary contacts or locations of where the chip originated from. If the chip was implanted at a vet clinic, through a rescue, or at another government shelter we then have the ability to contact them for owner information. As a government entity, other shelters will provide us with information from their local database in regards to past ownership that may not be available from the microchip company. If the chip was never registered and came from us or if that pet was previously lost and registered with our shelter, we will have information on that pet which a national database will not have. That means even if ownership information is not available to you or a vet clinic, we may still have it. Through our shelter we reunite microchipped pets DAILY that came up as otherwise not registered or info could not be given out publicly.
In addition to this we often see that certain chip scanners are more sensitive to specific brand chips, even those specified as universal scanners. At the shelter, we keep different brands of scanners in our Intake area and scan incoming animals with multiple scanners. Just this last week, we had two pets that were scanned at local veterinary clinics and no chip was located, but we were able to locate a chip during intake and get owner information. In the last year, we have even been able to locate and make contact from chips implanted in Germany, Asia, and Puerto Rico.
So the next time someone says, take it to the shelter to be scanned, you now have the answer why!
Pictured below is our Intake Coordinator and microchip guru Heather.
