Preventing A lost Pet

If you have ever lost a pet, even for a short amount of time, you know how sad and scared you can be. Many people in that situation put up posters with a picture and some kind of reward. In some cases the animal has returned home in good shape. In some other unfortunate cases, the animal does not return home and is never heard from again. This causes great stress to the family particularly any children in the household.

Having a pet is a big responsibility and there are some things you can do to help prevent them from being lost. Make sure the animal has a bright collar with recent information on their tags. On the collar have a tag with the animals name and your current phone and tags with all the current vaccination id numbers. This will help get the animal back to you if it should become lost, and someone locates it.

While having a collar on a pet can be very helpful in returning the animal to you, what if it should come off while the animal is roaming free? A great companion to the collar is a microchip. The microchip is injected like a vaccination under the flap of skin behind the dog or cats neck. This tiny chip is no larger than a grain of rice and will not cause any discomfort for your pet. Veterinarians and shelters are provided with a scanner that can read the numbers of the chip. If your animal is picked up as a stray and microchipped, the shelter or vet can scan your pet, call the microchip company, access your information and get your pet back to you.

You may be wondering about the costs associated with microchipping and where can I get it done? Your local shelter and veterinarian can do the microchipping. If you are getting a new puppy, kitten, dog or cat from a shelter, there is a good chance that it will already have received the microchip. The cost is around $40 to inject the chip and around $20 to activate it from the microchip company. $60 dollars is a bargain to keep your pet a little safer.