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Study - Microchips Help More Than Thought
10-19-2009
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Animals shelter officials housing lost pets that had been implanted with a microchip were able to find the owners in almost three out of four cases in a recently published national study.
According to the research, the return-to-owner rate for cats was 20 times higher and for dogs 2 ˝ times higher for microchipped pets than were the rates of return for all stray cats and dogs that had entered the shelters.
“This is the first time there has been good data about the success of shelters finding the owners of pets with microchips,” said Linda Lord, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State University.
“We found that shelters did much better than they thought they did at returning animals with microchips to their owners.”
Lord said that though the American public so far has not seemed to embrace the practice, this study suggests that pet owners should give strong consideration to microchipping their companion animals.
She also noted, however, that no animal identification is more effective than a tag on a collar that includes the pet’s name and the owner’s phone number.
Animal microchips are implanted at veterinary offices or shelters and contain a unique number that is revealed when the pet is scanned by a microchip detector. The number coincides with contact information that owners register with a microchip manufacturer.
“In the study, the biggest reason owners couldn’t be found was because of an incorrect or disconnected phone number in the registration database,” Lord said. “The chip is only as good as my ability as a pet owner to keep my information up to date in the registry.”
The research is published in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.
For the study, 53 shelters in 23 states agreed to maintain monthly records about microchipped animals brought to the facilities. Only shelters that automatically conduct scans for microchips on all animals were eligible to participate.
Data were collected from August 2007 to March 2008. The shelters reported outcomes for a total of 7,704 microchipped animals.
Strays made up slightly more than half of the animals tracked in the study, or 53 percent. About 42 percent of the animals had been surrendered by their owners, and were not factored into the return-to-owner rate.
The vast majority of microchips – 87 percent – were detected during a scan when the animals entered the shelter. About 10 percent were detected during a medical evaluation, and about 2 1/2 percent were detected just before the animals were scheduled for euthanasia or at some other time.
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