A microchip is a permanent identifier about the size of a grain of rice, placed under the skin between the shoulder blades. It takes seconds, needs no anesthetic, and feels like a vaccination. We can do it during any appointment, or while your pet is already asleep for another procedure.
Why It Matters More Than a Collar
Collars come off, often exactly when a frightened pet is squeezing through a gap. A chip doesn’t. Every shelter and veterinary practice scans found animals as a matter of routine, and a scanned chip is what gets a lost pet home.
Seattle is a city of fence gaps, open gates on moving day, and fireworks over Lake Union. Indoor cats are the ones people skip, and indoor cats are the ones who bolt through a door and have no collar, no tag, and no way of being identified.
It Is Not a GPS Tracker
This is the most common misunderstanding we hear, so it’s worth being direct. A microchip has no battery and no location function. It does nothing at all until someone holds a scanner over it, at which point it returns a number. It will not tell you where your dog is right now.
If live tracking is what you want, that’s a collar-mounted GPS unit, and it’s a reasonable thing to have as well — but it’s a different tool. The collar tells you where they went; the chip is what works after the collar is gone.
The Step People Miss
A microchip only works if it’s registered and kept up to date. We scan a great many chips that were implanted elsewhere and never registered, or registered to a phone number from three moves ago. We’ll register yours before you leave, and give you the details so you can update it yourself when you move.
Put a reminder somewhere you’ll actually see it: the chip registry belongs on the same list as your driver’s licence and your utilities when you change address or phone number.
If you’ve adopted a pet who already has a chip, bring them in. We’ll scan it, find out which registry it belongs to, and help you transfer it into your name. Shelter and rescue animals very often arrive chipped to the rescue rather than to you, and that is worth sorting out before you need it.
Travel
Most international destinations also require a microchip, and for many of them the chip must be placed before the rabies vaccination, or the vaccine won’t count for travel. The order matters more than the dates do, and redoing it costs months.
The European Union and a number of other destinations also require an ISO 11784/11785 standard chip — the 15-digit kind. Older American chips are 9 or 10 digits and are not readable by standard scanners abroad, so a pet with one may need a second chip placed. If travel is anywhere in your plans, mention it when you book and we’ll make sure the chip and the paperwork line up in the right order. See health certificates for the rest of that process.
If Your Pet Goes Missing
Call us, and call the registry to flag the chip as lost. Contact Seattle Animal Shelter and the surrounding county shelters directly rather than relying on their websites, and ask them to check for a chip on any animal matching the description. Chips are also sometimes missed because they have migrated slightly, so a good scan covers the whole body, not just the shoulders.