The importance of having a microchip implanted into your dog or cat is not just a legal procedure but is a vital part of ensuring that if your pet ends up going missing, they are not lost forever.
There are plenty of beautiful stories of microchips helping vets, shelters and local authorities bring families back together, sometimes after many years of an animal going missing.
However, as a rather unfortunate story regarding a lost dog who was rehomed demonstrates, microchips are an essential part of ensuring that a rescued pet is reunited with their forever home in good time, and avoid potential disputes over ownership.
Whenever an animal is rescued, they are often kept for a holding period of seven days under the ultimate duty of a local authority, although they often work with registered shelters and charities to help with this.
A regularly updated microchip ensures that the details of a pet owner are registered with an accredited database, allowing a vet to cross-reference the information based on the ID number on the chip and get in touch with the owners to let them know that their pet has been found and the process to help get them back.
The seven-day holding period starts from the date they are collected, and once it ends, the ownership of the dog or cat legally transfers to the council themselves, allowing them to be legally rehomed.
It is not seven days from when they are lost, however, so if they are microchipped or if an owner regularly checks lost pet listings, there is enough time for an owner aware that their pet has gone missing to regularly check to see if they have been found and get in touch.
The seven-day period also is a minimum waiting time; it is unlikely to be the case that minutes after the time runs out the dog or cat will be adopted, but it is also something that should not be risked.
