Can MicroChipping Your Pet Help Animal Charities And Save Energy?
If you have a cat, dog, ferret, rabbit, horse, tortoise or other large pets – you should get it a microchip!
It is National Microchipping Month in the UK, but wherever you live – it is still a great eco friendly thing you can do to make your life easier and that of local vets and animal rescue charities a lot easier – leaving their time free to do more vital procedures in their practices.
I know the connection is not that obvious – but remember that time is money, so if time has to be wasted by several people trying to catch, report, transport, check over, kennel and then search for and confirm the pets owners – this is wasted money, time and energy that could have virtually all been avoided if your pet had a microchip!
How Does It All Add Up?
Well, the first thing to do to make your pet ownership more eco friendly is to not lose you pet in the first place by making sure your garden is secure and that you do not leave children in charge of any animal unsupervised outside of your home.
However, once ‘lost’ it starts to create a problem – firstly for the considerate person who bothers to catch it and keep it safe. Working at a rescue centre I often get calls from poor people finding a lost pet on their way to work and then having to sort things out before getting into trouble at work for being late!
And there is that first phone call. They may call a local vet first or a rescue centre – either way there has to be staff on the other end of the phone to answer that call. Then comes the detail reporting: 1) firstly we need to check our paperwork to see if anyone has reported that pet missing, 2) if not, then we have to complete a form of our own to say that someone has found a particular pet, then 3) we need to give the finder advice about other locations to try and call for help, or even send around a volunteer to collect it so the finder can get to work!
All of this costs money – and uses up valuable charity time and the paper and ink for all the forms that need to be printed out.
And of course the owner who has lost their pet could be calling all sorts of other places reporting their pet missing as well – calling local vets, pet shops and rescue centres to see if anyone has reported the animal as ‘found’ – wasting even more time for all these different locations and their staff, completing endless forms full of contact information!
As you can imagine a lost dog could have created at least 6-10 phone calls (half from their owner and half from the ‘finder’) all around 5 minutes each (that’s up to 50 minutes) and completed around 3-6 ‘Lost & Found’ forms. What a waste of time!
And this is all assuming that the owner is found within an hour or 2. If not, then a rescue centre or vet might have to take in the animal over a period of a few days – using food and space that should be available to sick or injured animals.
If the rescue centre only has 10 kennels in the first place and 1 has got a ‘lost’ dog in it for a week and there is a ‘lost’ cat in another: it could have to turn away other abandoned animals due to lack of space.
All because the animal wasn’t clearly identified.
So Why The MicroChip?
Well, every veterinary surgery and rescue centre will have a handheld scanning machine that can pick up the code from an implanted microchip in your pet.
So if you find a ‘lost’ animal, like a dog or cat, you could just take it into a local vets and get it scanned in about 1 minute. And then you can virtually get the owner on the phone and the pet wil be home in no time at all! None of these round-the-houses phone calls – and no forms to fill out!
The number of each microchip is unique and can be used to pull up a record of the pet and all the owner contact details (if the owner has kept it up to date of course!).
Therefore if everyone had their pets chipped and everyone who ever finds a lost or injured animal takes it straight to any vet; this whole Lost & Found scenario – that takes place everyday across the country – will end!
Finder Then: Find lost cat, find a phone, call rescue centre and give details, phone local vet and leave details, phone another vet and leave details, phone local pet store and leave details, ask a few people in the area if they recognise cat, then make arrangements to keep pet secure and feed and water it until the owner is found, then wait by the phone all day until they call and finally make arrangements for owner to collect their cat.
Finder Now: Find a lost cat – take it to a vet - go home.
The Eco Friendly Result:
So now that every pet can be reunited with it’s owner without calling about 6 different people – the rescue centres and vets can use their staff to do more important things like treating sick and injured animals and finding homes for those that have been abandoned without having to worry about answering the phone all the time!
And we all know that making better use of your time and resources is the more eco friendly option – so by microchipping your pet, you could be plugging that little gap in the pet world and saving energy and time to boot!
Not to mention getting that lost pet back to it’s owner the fastest and safest way!
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Tags: animal care, animal volunteer, cat rescue, dog rescue, found a dog, found cat, how do i find, i have lost my, june 2010, local charity, lost and found, lost cat, lost dog, lost pet, lost tortoise, microchip, pet charity, pet id, pet microchipping, pet rescue, rescue centre, veterinary surgery, volunteer, your pet