Chipped with Love: Protecting Pets with Peace of Mind

By Karen Delicate, Hobo’s Healing Heart Board Member

June is National Microchipping Month, a time to remind everyone about this important tool to protect your pet’s safety and bring peace of mind to you.

If your dog or cat is ever separated from you, gets lost, or worse, stolen, a microchip can help you get your pet home. If they should wind up in a full shelter, a microchip can save their life.

While collars and tags are important, they can fall off, be taken off, or be modified. Microchips provide permanent pet identification and allow pets to be reunited with their owners quickly.

The top priority for pet owners should be to keep their pets safe, and microchipping is a quick, safe, and inexpensive way to protect them from harm.

Microchipping involves inserting a small radio frequency identification transponder encased in a tiny tube beneath the animal’s skin, roughly the size of a grain of rice.

The microchipping procedure is safe, simple, and only takes a few minutes.

The veterinarian will first scan your pet with a reader to make sure it isn’t already chipped.

Next, the veterinarian will insert the tiny chip tube using a syringe, not unlike giving an animal its shots. The chip is scanned with the scanner to ensure it is placed and read by the reader.

They will then complete the paperwork and enroll your pet in the online database.

The microchip contains your pet’s unique identification number, so if your pet should ever become separated from you, veterinarians, shelters, and animal control can read the chip with any scanner and follow the link from the animal ID number to the appropriate online pet databases to trace a lost or stolen animal and reunite it with its rightful owner.

With all the natural disasters in the headlines recently—wildfires, floods, and more—these illustrate the reality that disasters can strike anywhere and at any time. Often, with these disasters come lost pets.

Microchipping is so important for identifying lost pets when they become separated from their families.

If your pet is not microchipped, Hobo’s Healing Heart recommends you have it done—that chip just might save a life.