Every dog has its day, and every day “has” its dog! So Friday August 15 has been declared as “Check the Chip Day,” by the AVMA (American Veterinary Medicine Association) and the AAHA (American Animal Hospital Association). It serves as a good reminder to make sure your dog’s microchip contact information is correct—perhaps you adopted a dog from a rescue group and forgot to change the contact info to yours, or your address has changed and you didn’t notify the microchip registry. And, if your dog isn’t chipped yet, this is also gives you the impetus to do it now—helps to ensure that you can be easily reunited with your dog if she is ever lost. A study of more than 7,700 stray animals at animal shelters showed that dogs without microchips were returned to their owners 21.9% of the time, whereas microchipped dogs were returned to their owners 52.2%. If you don’t know your dog’s chip number—a requirement to log into the registry—ask your vet or shelter to use a universal scanner to read the chip. Microchips come in various frequencies. Unfortunately there is no one frequency yet in place, so frequencies might be 125 kilo Hertz (kHz), 128 kHz, or 134.2 kHz, and only an universal scanner can read all of these. It also gets more complicated because each registry has its own database, but the AAHA maintains Universal Pet Microchip Lookup Tool linking all the registries. See this helpful video for more information about microchipping and if you have more questions these FAQs from the AVMA are useful.
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