Dear Sir,
I am appalled beyond belief that you have rescinded you recommendation that all vets scan new patients as “best practice”. Why have you done this? It would appear that it is because there is insufficient understanding about the part the databases play in re-unification, and your members, our veterinary practices, may find it difficult and uncomfortable. (Try having a dog stolen and sold on – see how difficult and uncomfortable that is!)
Does this really mean that for all the years that you, the profession, have been charging us for inserting microchips, you were actually unaware of how they worked? And that you failed to find out before you made a recommendation on which basis Defra have drawn up their guidelines? And it has taken you the best part of a further twelve months to discover this? Because you STATED on Nov 13th last year that your guidelines were that scanning new patients was “best practice” Defra failed to introduce compulsory scanning, and further, their reply to our e-petition stopped its momentum. That petition was to address other failures in the microchip system as well, and was ignored by the government because they believed you were supporting it.
The entire microchip industry is now growing like a triffid, and is totally ungoverned. There are many good, caring and honest microchippers out there, but there are also known dog thieves who are “registered” microchippers. That means they did the course which costs about £150, and currently has no pre-register requirements.
If you find it so difficult to recommend that your members scan new patients because you cannot understand which databases will act in re-unification and which will not, please let me make it easier for you. There is one database which will help with the re-unification. It is Petlog. If your profession only implanted chips that were registered to Petlog, they would deal with re-unification, and then you could change your minds again, and re-institute scanning of new patients as “best practice”. If it goes against your ethics to recommend a particular brand, surely it is not outwith your standard of values to recommend the use of chips
“registered to a database signing up to the British Code of Practice, which has in place procedures for re-unification in the case of dispute and is linked to the new technology scanners which show ‘REPORTED LOST’ on the scanner .”
Petlog are currently the only database linked to the Halo scanner, and if you also recommended the use of new generation scanners to save time checking chip numbers with databases as well as using chips registered to them, then microchips would actually be doing the job they have been purported to do for the last twenty-five years. The veterinary industry thrives because of the devotion of people to their furred and feathered family members. We believed that microchips would enable them to come home should anyone find them if they were lost. That belief has been totally betrayed.
Just because chips are cheap as chips, you are not absolved from reading the small print. Buy on ethics, not profit, and the industry will change.
I understood, possibly wrongly, that a vet’s first duty was “to do no harm” . Well, all that is necessary for evil (or in this case, harm) to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Loss of a companion animal causes untold grief to the animal friends of missing ones and their owners – we know that – and we can only speculate as to what confusion, ill health and unhappiness is caused to the missing ones themselves.
In turning a blind eye to the ownership of these companion animals, on the health of which your industry is based, you are also turning a blind eye to the massive increase in theft, effectively condoning it.
Yours faithfully
Caroline Key Ph.D
12th November’14.
You can sign the new petition for compulsory microchip scanning on this link:- http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/68410
Rags still missing.
http://www.doglost.co.uk/dog-blog.php?dogId=32420#.VGNKQzSsVBE
