What is the best way to ID my Dog – Microchip or id dog tags for dogs ?
To me, there is nothing more frightening than losing a pet. What is your best option to best ensure that your pet is returned to you if lost? Other than a regular dog tag, the most common is implanting a microchip into your dog. A small glass bead no bigger than a grain of rice is implanted between your dogs shoulders. Inside this bead is radio transmitter that can be detected by a scanner that most veterinarians have. There are even courses that you can take online to learn how to manage this.
Before you decide to take this step to protect you pet, please consider the following.
Health Risks
Pet owners are often ensured by their veterinarian that microchip implants are completely harmless. They base this on Marial’s (a pharmaceutical giant) claim that scientific studies show that this process is painless without any risk of complications like; allergic reactions, itchiness, abscess or cancerous growth. I’m not sure how they can claim this since there are several published studies recorded by British Animal Veterinary Association (BSVA) that prove otherwise.
Test and studies done on mice show development of aggressive and deadly microchip-induced cancerous tumor growth. The same was observed in zoo animals that have been chipped. Several reports and studies show cats and dogs with cancerous growth at the site of the chip implants, some very aggressive in nature.
At age six Scotty, a healthy and active Yorkshire developed epitheliotropic lymphoma at the location of his Schering-Plough Home Again microchip implant. Within months, poor Scotty was dead from the cancer.
After Bulkin, a cat developed cancer at the site her Home Again Implant in 2010, the owner Andrea Rutherford filed a lawsuit against Merck Sharp & Dohme and Digital Angel Inc.
Many claim that the risk of developing cancer from a microchip implant is minuscule to nonexistent. Decades of scientific data show that implanting an object into a body of a pet or human can lead to complications like cancer. If this happened to me, I don’t really care how small of a risk it is.
The procedure itself have caused lives! In 2004, a kitten suddenly died during an implant procedure. BSVA reported that the chip was later found in the brain stem of this poor little kitten.
The owner of Charlie Brown, a Chihuahua, wanted to make sure that if their beloved dog got lost they had a better chance to have her returned. They looked at their options and selected to go with microchipping since everyone claimed it was safe. Charlie Brown was dead two hours later from an extreme bleeding from the hole in the skin where the needle went in.
Does it work as advertised?
The makers claim that this is a permanent and lifetime form of identification. The fact is that they can migrate to other parts of the body, even expelled completely.
Another puzzling problem is that the microchip number can be duplicated. Efforts to correct this have been attempted to no avail.
Scanners are also of various quality, and a microchipped pet that is lost and found can end up euthanized or re-adopted because a bad scanner did not detect the chip.
This happened to Hadden a microchipped American Pitbull that got lost and, unfortunately, ended up at Stafford County, Virginia, Animal Shelter, a kill shelter. When the scan did not detect her chip, she was euthanized before the owner, Lisa Massey could locate her. She was told they were sorry and informed her they had scanned Hadden twice. Oh, this makes me so sad.
So are there any alternatives?
I have researched this and found something that speaks to me as a dog lover and gadget freak. These are QR-coded tags. They look like regular dog tags, but they have a QR code that you can scan with your smart phone. Many phones already come with this app, if not, you can download it.
The Company is PetHub, and this is the way it works: Add you pet to their website, buy a tag, and then link that tag to your account.
If your pet is lost, the contact information can be retrieved by scanning the tag or entering a URL on the tag. A web page with your pet’s contact information will appear. There is also a phone number to call.
This is what I use and there is not harm to the pet. I highly recommend this solution.
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