Getting The Microchip Mess Solved

Now I know we’ve all been advised to microchip our dogs to make it easy to find us, ensure the dogs don’t become projects in some research facility or killed at the local animal control facility. We’ve been lulled into a sensibility that all will be well as long as we microchip.  But there’s as big a flaw in that thinking as the flaws found in the microchip identification business.  I would bet you didn’t know we had a microchip mess to solve!

Shelters and others in the companion animal industry have long known that the chip readers used to detect microchips can’t read all chips. One scanner can only read certain chips, another other chips, and the supposedly “Universal” reader just isn’t. 

If you can get a reading, you may not be able to get identifying information without searching through multiple competing registries and calling each. It’s not flawed technology, its politics, patent protection, and business interests that are mucking up the ability of the technology to work efficiently. What do you do with this tangled web to fix it?  That’s where Olivia Sadlowski comes in.

Sadlowski’s day job was helping Silicon Valley start-ups advance, and in her spare time she volunteered for several shelters. When a stray showed up, she offered to round up a scanner and that’s when she found out about the weaknesses in the system. She talked with engineers and others, did the research, and came up with a solution called Chloe’s Standard, named after her adopted dog.

Released in Beta version this past Tuesday, the search engine at  checkthechip allows you to enter the chip number, and will tell you which directory contains the owner’s information from the six US chip companies. Chloe’s Standard has a couple of other goals: Provide scanners in convenient places for use after shelter and clinic hours; an awareness campaign to advise people to get their chips checked on a regular basis and ensure the chip is readable and the information is up to date. 

Chloe’s Standard is not designed to work with foreign chips, but Europe already has its own search engine, unfettered, I assume, by trademark issues in this regard. An international standard for microchips has been active in most countries around the world for years, but the majority of the 8 to16 million chips implanted in American pets don’t conform. You can read the history of how this occurred and more in this informative article by Edie Lau at VIN news services.