Whether you travel with your pet or not, it is important to consider the importance of microchipping your pet. Over 80% of pets that are separated from their owners are never reunited. That’s enough to get anyone thinking about this.
Would requiring microchips in pets and owner registration help reduce the number of strays in pet shelters and the cost of boarding and euthanizing them? Certainly, it will increase the number of reunions between pets and their owners. It would also increase accountability in pet owners encouraging them to turn in their pet to a shelter as opposed to abondoning them. When traveling with a pet, microchips are essential to protect your pet should it be lost or separated from you.
Are there further issues as well? How would the program be enforced? Would mandatory microchipping in domesticated pets mark the start of greater identification in all animals and eventually in humans?
Discuss this with other pet owners in our forum: https://www.pettravel.com/forum/showthread.php/65-Making-microchips-mandatory-in-pets-a-growing-trend.
There is research showing that microchips can cause a dangerous, aggressive form of cancer (over 10% when tested on mice). The risks are too high especially for very small dogs. Microchips don’t provide any benefits over tattoos especially, as always with electronics, scanners often fail to read them. I believe it is the the right of the owner to be able to choose what form of identification they want for their pet and imposing microchips on all travelling animals takes away the rights that are supposed to be quaranteed to us.
RESPONSE
I have not seen the research you refer to. However, if you wish to travel Internationally with your pet a microchip is almost always required for identification. Some EU countries still accept Tattoos but that ends in June of 2011.
Jerry
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