Are Microchips 'the Solution' or 'the Unsolvable Problem'?

Photo - Slava Blazer/courtesy Olivia White

After seven years, Check the Chip gives up on the microchip industry sighting unsolvable problems and a tangled industry.

Recent reports in the VIN News Service have highlighted problems associated with current microchip services. 

Olivia White, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur was an expert at solving problems for startup companies, but she has abandoned a seven-year quest to improve the convoluted system of identifying lost pets through their implanted microchips.

“We gave it the ol’ college try and we want nothing more to do with it," says Olivia White the founder and CEO of Check the Chip.  White gave up last month after testing kiosks to educate pet owners about how microchip scanners work and the importance of registering their pets’ microchip information. The strategy proved unsuccessful as pet owners were indifferent to understanding the issue.

“They (pet owners) need to be involved in the process, and at this point, I don’t know who’s more to blame,” White said. “Microchip companies may have built this confusing, convoluted system, but as a pet owner, it’s your responsibility to make sure (your pets) are protected. I don’t know what else to do.”

White stumbled into the perplexing field of pet microchips in 2008 after receiving an email about a lost pug. “Someone gave the microchip number, I started looking into it and I fell down the rabbit hole,” she recollects.

White learned the microchip number isn’t sufficient to identify an animal. The microchip has to be registered to the owner and the finder needs to know which registry holds the information. Competition in the microchip market prevents companies from creating a single, all-encompassing registry.

White also learned that not all scanners read all microchips and most pet owners had no clue when asked where their data was kept. Most often they would say ‘With the shelter or pet store or vet.’

White's company was funded by investors. “This wasn’t a student project,” said White. “It was a full-fledged attempt to solve a problem. It cost us a lot of money, and we had a lot of amazing people working for us. I’m so convinced that there’s no humanly possible way, unless all of the companies decide they’re all going to work together, which is never going to happen!” she said.

In September of 2009, the American Animal Hospital Association
(AAHA), a well-known nonprofit organization in the animal-health community, launched a microchip lookup tool. According to AAHA, fifteen registries currently participate in the online lookup tool which was searched 66,000 times a month during the first six months of 2015.

At AAHA, senior communications manager, Kate Wessels, agrees the system is frustrating and complicated but says it works enough to make it worthwhile. Wessels tells the story of a stray dog found last year in Colorado. The dog had a microchip that was registered to a man in Michigan. He turned out to be the owner’s brother; the owner hadn’t updated the ownership information on the dog’s registration but through a veterinarian’s perseverance, the dog was reunited with its owner. “It really is a team effort,” Wessels said. “The owner, the veterinarian, the registries — it’s everybody’s responsibility.”

InfoStream clicked into the AAHA tool on Tuesday, 04 August, 2015 and were greeted with this message:

Pet Microchip Lookup:

Enter the microchip ID below and click "Search". Enter only the 9, 10 or 15 character microchip number, with no punctuation or spaces. Do not include the microchip type code or manufacturer’s name or abbreviation. The results are returned with the most recent entry displaying first. Therefore, start by calling the company listed first in the "enrolled with" box. If you are unable to get the correct information from the top record, work your way down the list.

At this time we are unable to search the SmartTag® microchip registry. We are working with SmartTag® to get reconnected as soon as possible.

For a recent VIN News Service story, Tamara Rees created a graphic to show how microchip confusion can result in a bad result for people and pets. These slides provide a simple but telling view of the microchip problem.

However, as the VIN article linked below shows, problems continue to develop. New entrants to the microchip business using the generic '900' code and the spawning of additional data islands by other organizations will mean confusion across North America is unlikely to decrease. 

Everyone seems to be chasing a low cost microchip or the creation of a customer base they can leverage for revenue and contacts. Even Humane and Rescue organizations have entered the fray.

In Canada, the SPCA in British Columbia has contacted veterinarians and municipal licensing agencies to offer a low cost microchip and yet another microchip data base owned and controlled by BCSPCA. 


The phone list is growing and a simple Return to Owner (RTO) process does not exist across North America.

Everyone knows life is complicated but everyone also understands that keeping a pet healthy and safe shouldn't be.

With smart phones widely available and cloud technology now providing community wide connectivity a simple solution should be nearby.

Perhaps the Return to Owner dilemma deserves further attention when the industry gathers for the tenth annual Summit for Urban Animal Strategies in October.

Read - New entrants to pet microchip market draw critics