Your pet is your best friend who belongs by your side. But what happens if the two of you are accidentally separated?
Although you may take precautions to prevent this, events out of your control are always possible, such as a forgotten open gate or a natural disaster. Preparing for the unexpected will give your pet the best chance of finding their way back home.
A collar with up-to-date identification tags is a good initial step. Collars help potential rescuers know at first glance that your pet has a loving home. But collars aren’t foolproof. They can break, fall off or even be removed intentionally. In fact, cats should always wear breakaway collars to prevent injury or entrapment.
A microchip is a permanent form of identification that will never go missing. Your veterinarian implants the tiny chip, the size of a grain of rice, in your pet with one simple, safe injection. These injections are relatively painless—even the smallest of puppies and kittens do well with them!
The microchip has a unique identification number to which you register your and your pet’s information on an online database. If your pet is ever picked up as a stray by a veterinary hospital, shelter or humane society, they simply retrieve the number by waving a microchip scanner over your pet’s back, then log the number into the database to find you.
All stray and injured animals are routinely scanned as matter of course in veterinary and animal facilities, so you can rest easy knowing that as long as your pet makes it to the hands of an animal professional, then the two of you will soon be reunited.
With a microchip in place, you can have peace of mind knowing that you and your pet have the best odds of staying together.
Find your nearest VCA hospital and ask about microchipping >>
