As someone who works in a vet clinic I strongly recommend getting your dog or cat microchipped. In less than a year we have had a least 6 dogs brought in with no ID but a microchip and got them reunited, including one who had been missing for about a week and was about an hour drive away from home. I have had plenty of calls of people reporting their dog missing with no tags on but a microchip, only to call in a few hours later that someone had found the dog or cat and taken it somewhere where it was scanned and they were able to get their pet back home. I just had one of those calls
I can only imagine how many pets are reunited at the shelter.
Yes the needle is not tiny, but plenty of pets get on just fine having it done. Some pets will yowl in fear/pain at anything you do. Having it done during a routine surgery such as a spay or neuter is a good idea if you’re concerned about the pain.
While it seems a legitimate concern not to microchip your laboratory rat, even the staunchest opponents list single digits of cases of dogs and cats who had a chip in or near their sarcoma as their “evidence”, some of which are cancer prone breeds, out of the millions of pets who are microchipped each year. While heartbreaking for their owners, this less than one in a million, doctors acknowledge that the presence of a foreign body may have triggered the cancer but that does not show causation that the microchip would be of special concern over another type of foreign body. Two of the cases listed aren’t even cancer related, but due to human error in injecting the microchip improperly. More pets have developed sarcomas from vaccines.
Not knowing who has what scanner, or an owner’s failure to to update the registration is not a reason not to do it, it’s a reason to have better scanners and for owners, veterinary practices and shelters to be more vigilant in keeping records up to date.
Nobody realizes their dog or cat could escape from where they escaped from until it does. I didn’t know my dog could run down a cliff that was at least a 50 degree angle until he was 150 feet down it; owners don’t know their dog can scale an 8 foot fence until it already has; or that their indoor cat would bolt past them that one time after years of showing no interest in that door. And trying to grab a breakaway collar to catch them means it should, well, break away! How is that a fail-safe way to keep an ID on a dog exactly?
Microchipping is not a “false” sense of security, and for every dog with a chip that couldn’t be read, there are hundreds if not thousands who never get back home because their owners didn’t microchip their pets in the first place.
