Pet gone astray? Microchip standard saves the day

2007-08-21

It’s becoming something of a tradition at the Ottawa Humane Society.

Once a month, the shelter invites people from all over the city and its outlying areas to bring in their pets for a quick, nearly painless procedure that could end up saving the animals’ life should they wander away from home.

The shelter is one among many that are holding regular microchip implantation clinics in order to encourage pet owners to adopt this type of information technology as a pet identification tool.

The implants are no larger than a grain of rice and cause animals no more discomfort than a vaccination shot, but they contain invaluable information such as the pet owner’s name, phone number and address.

When a lost animal is found, staff at a veterinarian’s office, humane society, animal shelter or breed club can use a simple hand-held scanner to check for a microchip implant. If the scanner can access the information on the microchip, it can mean a quick return that saves the pet owner grief and animal shelters precious resources.

Tara Jackson, the communications manager at the Ottawa Humane Society, says microchip technology make an important difference in returning lost pets to their owners.

“We have about a 65 per cent success rate in locating dogs’ owners with the chip,” she adds. On the other hand, according to Jackson, there are far fewer cats with the microchip identification. As a result, the success rate of finding their owners is only five per cent.

“Getting a microchip implant, along with using visible collar identification, is one of the things we really encourage people to do for their pets,” she says. “And one of the first things we do when people bring in a lost pet is scan them for a microchip.”

The shelter’s success at finding the pets’ owners is made even more successful when the scanners used can recognize and read the implanted microchip.

That was the push behind the International Organization for Standardization’s development of the international standard ISO 11784/11785 in 1996.  The standard was created to specify the operating frequency of pet microchip implants.

The reasoning is, the more regions where the standard is adopted, the more likely the scanner will be to recognize the chip and be able to read the valuable information recorded on it.

Because of the voluntary nature of the standard, not all businesses and organizations with a vested interest in animal welfare use microchips that have been manufactured to this standard in their implantation. But more of them are choosing to use them, with the knowledge that the standard design will increase the effectiveness of the chips.

Dr. Warren Skippon, the staff Doctor of Veterinary Medicine at the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, asserts the majority of players in Canada realize that the ISO-standard chip is the “gold standard.”

“Anyone who uses chips with the older technology runs the risk that they’re not going to work with all scanners,” he explains. “So the ISO (standardized) chips are recognized as the appropriate chips to use for implantation.”

Dr. Skippon adds that the National Companion Animal Coalition, of which his association is a member, requires its members to use ISO-standardized microchips in its implantations. Given that the coalition includes representatives of the Canadian Federation for Humane Societies, the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council of Canada and the Canadian Kennel Club as members, the majority of organizations that use the microchip identification process use the one that has been developed based on the ISO standard.

And that majority is likely to keep growing, he says.

“Most companies realize they want to be recognized by the National Companion Animal Coalition, and so they are going to adopt the technology that it requires,” he says.

Canada is not alone in its adoption of these standardized microchips. Parts of Europe, Asia and Australia have implemented the standard since its development in 1996, and in the United States, the American Veterinary Medical Association, American Animal Hospital Association, and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have all encouraged the animal microchip industry to adopt the ISO standard.

In Ottawa, the ISO standard has been vital to helping get lost pets back to their owners. Jackson said the Humane Society uses two scanners when checking for microchip identification – both of which work on the frequency of ISO11784/11785.

Back