chipped animals

[scorpious123]

can anyone tell me if you can have a dog tagged and traced if a animal gets stolen or lost my labrador has been chipped but i was wondering if you get them chipped and trced by satolite just like a car ? because all the animals that get stolen in this country each year i worry about my dog. Apparently over fifty thousand dogs get stolen each year

[lankeela]

Microchips in dogs and cats only work whent hey are read by a scanner placed over the animal. If the dog is found by a dog warden, or taken to a vet or rescue organisation they should (notice I say 'should') be scanned and the details of the owner can then be traced because they are kept on a database. Therefore it is important if you move (or even if you go on holiday) to let the database people know (most are with Petlog). I would think that to implant a satellite tracking device in an animal would be very costly and probably too big to go under the skin like a microchip does.
Dog theft is indeed on the increase, visit http://www.doglost.co.uk to see just how many go missing every day. Not all stolen, but many are, only this week an elderly owner has had a Newfoundland cross stolen after leaving it outside a supermarket near Wigan. Please don't leave your dog in a supermarket car park or tied up outside a shop, people are nicking them and either claiming a reward, or selling them on in pubs etc.

[lankeela]

I like the thought of this though, send your dog out for a walk and track its route on a computer!

[fredpuli47]

Tracking devices are available. They are useful to hunters, who may need to locate their dog in wild countryside. The snag with these devices is that they are quite large. So the animal needs to be quite a good-size dog to carry one all day without discomfort.The first ones were simple radio transmitters, and you used a receiver to detect the signal sources , and not with any great precision, but one company at Cruft's last year had got something more sophisticated, like a gps system on a car but with feedback. to your pc or handheld device Presumably they'd tried fitting an ordinary satnav but the dog didn't understand some posh woman telling it 'turn around when possible!"

The blurb assured readers that the device would indicate the position of the dog to two metres. Snag with that was, it assumed that I could get within two metres of a wolfhound who didn't want to be caught ! And, unfortunately, even that device was too big for a smallish dog, so border colie owners will still have to rely on clever whistling

[kita1]

Not exactly a microchip - but along the same lines.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/72815 29.stm