Home sweet home |
Communities turning to pet ID systems
to reduce strays, cut shelter costs
More and more city and county animal shelters are counting on a high-tech pet-retrieval system backed by a national pet organization and a leading pharmaceutical company to help reunite more lost pets with owners and shed their “dog catcher” image.
Community shelters also hope the system will take a bite out of their rising costs for animal care. According to the Humane Society of the United States, the cost to impound the 8 to 12 million animals brought to community shelters each year is approaching $1 billion.
The pet-retrieval system involves injecting a small microchip — about the size of a grain of rice — under the skin between the shoulder blades of a dog or cat, much the same way a vaccine is administered. Each chip is coded with a unique, 10-digit number registered with the American Kennel Club’s (AKC) Companion Animal Recovery program.
When a lost pet arrives at the shelter, a special hand-held scanner — similar to scanners used in supermarkets — is passed over the animal’s shoulder blades. The chip is found and the pet’s number is read. The shelter can then notify the AKC, which immediately contacts the pet’s owner or, if necessary, a veterinarian, relative or other people previously designated by the owner.
Universal scanner
The concept of microchipping pets is not new. However, the recent development of a universal scanner that can read all manufacturers’ microchips has helped the practice gain momentum. The scanner is now in use at some 6,000 community shelters and 7,000 veterinary clinics nationwide.
As of July 1998, one microchipping system, HomeAgain, was in use in more than 5,800 communities in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, according to Schering-Plough Animal Health, Union, N.J., the pharmaceutical company that distributes the product.
One of these communities is in Oregon. Multnomah County Animal Control, headquartered in Troutdale, has a shelter serving the Portland area that takes in about 10,000 dogs and cats annually. About 90 percent are strays picked up off the streets.
Before the county started a microchipping program, about 45 percent of dogs and 1 to 2 percent of cats brought to its shelters were reunited with owners, says John Rowton, community information specialist with Multnomah animal control. The shelter found homes for many of the unclaimed pets, but about 1,000 adoptable dogs and 900 cats still had to be euthanized each year, he says.
To lower those numbers, the shelter started a microchipping program about two years ago. Anyone adopting a pet at the Multnomah shelter is strongly encouraged to have the pet microchipped and registered with the AKC database — a service provided by the shelter for less than $14 per animal, Rowton says.
Owners picking up a lost dog or cat are also encouraged to have their pet microchipped at their veterinary clinic, and all dogs or cats that come into the shelter are scanned for the presence of a microchip.
“We haven’t keep statistics on this, but since the use of microchipping, we have definitely increased the number of pets reunited with owners. It’s been especially noticeable with cats, and the numbers should continue to go up as more pets are microchipped,” Rowton says.
System advantages
Two microchipping systems are currently on the market. Multnomah based its decision primarily on scanner accuracy.
“We participated in a study of the various scanners,” he says. “The system we selected had the most reliable scanner — it picked up 100 percent of chips scanned, whether they were chips from this system or not,” he says.
Backing from the AKC recovery program was another important consideration, Rowton says. It has over 250,000 pets enrolled in its national database, is open 24-hours daily and maintains a toll-free number (800/252-7894) and e-mail address (found@akc.org) where found pets can be reported.
Pets with the microchip system used by Multnomah are also given a bright yellow collar tag imprinted with their identification number and the AKC's toll-free number. Often, the tag alone gets the pet home, but tags can easily come off, and the microchip serves as a reliable backup. In fact, 100 percent of the more than 10,000 pets in the AKC database that were lost and then found have been recovered.
Tattooing is another method of identifying pets, says Rowton, but tattoos can blur and fade over time, and they can be altered.
Improved image
For a city or county shelter, the single biggest benefit of microchipping, according to Rowton, is an improved image.
“It’s good public relations. We don’t want to be perceived as dog and cat catchers who pick up animals and kill them,” he says. “That’s not where we’re at any more,” he says. “We want to be perceived as running a humane service, reuniting lost pets and owners.”
Microchipping also resolves another problem encountered at shelters — proof of ownership. Sometimes, more than one person will want to claim a pet and a dispute results. Microchipping provides a permanent, unalterable way of identifying pets, Rowton says.
Mandatory chipping
Other animal-control experts want to do more than encourage the use of microchipping — they want to make it mandatory. Robert Hillman, manager of the animal services division, Albuquerque, N.M., has proposed an ordinance, soon to be considered by the city council, that would require microchipping of all animals brought to the city’s two shelters — whether they are unclaimed animals to be adopted or lost pets to be reunited with their owners.
The shelters take in about 24,000 animals annually. Close to 20 percent are returned to owners; another 25 percent are adopted out and the remainder must be euthanized, says Hillman, who also serves on the board of directors of the National Animal Control Association.
Hillman views microchipping as a way to improve public safety. “If a dog is picked up for biting, we want to require that it be microchipped. If it bites again, we’ll know it was that dog — even if the owner disputes our claim,” he says.
Minimal cost
According to Rowton and Hillman, microchipping costs shelters next to nothing to use and it saves money. Schering-Plough Animal Health Corporation, for example, sells microchips to animal shelters for a minimal cost and provides a universal scanner free to shelters that want to participate in the system.
“It costs $10.20 per animal to chip it and use the AKC database. That’s about the cheapest life insurance policy I’ve ever seen on an animal,” Hillman says.
Rowton points out that the cost to shelters for providing microchipping is passed on to people adopting pets. “Microchipping also saves us money,” he says. “If we get pets back to their owners in minutes or hours instead of holding them for three days, we don’t have to pay to feed them or house and care for them.”
Hillman says it costs about $52 daily to care for each animal in a shelter, not including special veterinary care required.
“The purpose of an animal shelter is to reunite an owner with a lost pet as quickly as possible. With a good microchipping system, you can make that happen in minutes, not days. It gives us the potential for saving a big part of our budget simply by enabling us to identify pets better than we ever have before,” Hillman says. “This is a technology whose time has come.”