Microchipping Service

It could be the difference between finding or never seeing your 4-legged friend again. 2 months ago the Tom Green County Humane Society added microchipping services to its monthly flea and tick dip clinics. Nicole Sanchez explains why a stop for chips and dips on Saturday, just might save your dog or cat's life.
 

It’s a unique identification number known as a microchip, designed for recovering lost pets. This is a newly added service that the Tom Green County Humane Society has combined with their monthly flea and tick dip clinics. This coming weekend will be the 3rd time that the society has combined the two services for animals.

Elaine Briley, board member of the Tom Green County Humane Society says, “We started doing it with the tick dip because it’s more of an awareness type thing, to let people know.”

Pet owners will have the option of either two choices on Saturday, if they take their pet to be microchipped, they can either receive a voucher to later take their pet to have the service or they can have it done on site. Either way the procedure only takes a few seconds.

Board member Mary Wilson demonstrated this quick procedure, “We insert it here in this loose skin below their shoulder blades and it’s inserted just into the skin it doesn’t go into the muscle tissue and the chip is designed so that it implants itself right there in the skin so it doesn’t move throughout the body.”
 
“If he was chipped then all the facilities would do, would be just to run the scanner over him.”

“It tells me that this is registered to this particular animal and that will have the owners name, phone, address and there’s no way that another animal will have this unique number,” Wilson explains.
 
A miniature bar code is about the size of a grain of rice, and it can give both the animal as well as the owner a lifetime of security.

 “I’ve encountered so many people that if I just had that microchip. I’d have my dog back today,” Briley says. 

Saturday's clinic will run from 8 AM to 12 PM right next door to the Tom Green County Humane Society at the 4-H building. The cost is only $20 to microchip each pet.