Your pet's microchip may now be useless after chip company goes out of business | Hacker News Reader

Your pet's microchip may now be useless after chip company goes out of business

local12.com

28 pointscpeterso26 comments

The title is misleading: the chip isn't useless, it is basically NFC and can be read just fine. The number on it can be looked up in a registry to notify the owner of a lost pet. I believe there is nothing preventing you from registering the same number with multiple registries. Hope that helps.

> I believe there is nothing preventing you from registering the same number with multiple registries

Most cities require you to register your pet and get a license. Part of that process is to share the microchip number, vaccine records, vet info etc. Our local animal shelter usually checks with the city if a microchip is found but no ownership is established.

What city requires you to register your pet and get a license? I’ve never heard of that before. Sounds kind of crazy. I’m assuming this is very regional.

Out of interest, why does it sound kind of crazy?

Here, pets have always had to be identifiable: historically with a collar, but microchips have been required for some years now as a more effective method.

(That applies nationally, not some city thing)

If I remember correctly, EU will make chip tracking for pets mandatory by 2030 to unify laws that are currently made by individual states. France had this mandatory for over a decade.

If you want to travel within EU with your pet, you'll need a certificate for that as well.

No idea about how it is is the US but that doesn't sound crazy to register pets as they are at risk of being lost, abandonned, lacking vaccination or vets visits.

You know, I regularly lose or forget my baseball caps (at least once per Summer, and usually I go through 2 or 3). I wish there was a nationally-mandated register of headwear, with obligatory chipping at the points of sale. Not even entirely joking.

On a more serious note, it's interesting to note that some property never gets any ownership marks on it, some gets it customarily but only out of convenience, there is no legal obligation to do so, and for some property it is legally-mandated by the state but owners largely find it cumbersome.

For maybe 100 years, we’ve lived in an era of diminished hat importance. I, for one, don’t want to be caught hatless around any sharp-tongued re-enactors.

Every city in Ohio for one.

https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-955.01

All 50 states have dog licensing in some form, but it seems that it's more a case of the state allowing municipalities to do so or not. Some states also require veterinarians to report unlicensed dogs. Larger cities almost certainly require it (NYC and Chicago definitely do).

https://www.rover.com/blog/dog-license/

Usually it's an animal welfare and control thing: you pay a lot more if you don't spay/neuter, rabies vaccination is required, etc.. Otherwise it's too easy for a city to be overrun by strays.

Also, if your pet gets lost and ends up being picked up by animal control, it's considered a stray if it's not registered.

At least in the US, all states have some or the other ordinances and regulations around pets. Not only are you required to register your pets, but there’s limits to what you can keep as a pet and how many. Otherwise it’s not hard to see at least one person in the neighborhood hoarding 20 dogs.

Ok. Where can I get a licence for my fish, Eric ?

This has happened before. I think given the legalisms around pets, ownership, responsibility, all of the chip registry companies should have been required to put the data into escrow, with a recovery plan and a handler of last resort in the form of a CSV file or something.

DNS would be fine, too. At minimum, a LOC record for a helpful neighbor.

I didn't expect "just put it in the DNS" to translate to "woof woof woof woof woof" but .. it kind of makes Woof.

In the US, there are something like 40+ pet chip registration companies. The problem of fragmentation is that the portable NFC chip ID number needs to be associated with each of them. This is dubious in the age of private equity and a total market failure. This is something that should be run as a single nonprofit to avoid this useless and unnecessary confusion.

NFC chips can store a fair amount of data (think QR code). Why bother with the database? Why is the standard not just saving one's email and phone number to the chip?

Because how else can they make someone depend on them after the sell?

I see this also with QR codes. I see tons in for, example, restaurants which contain a link to some private company which automatically redirects to the restaurant's own page. They can get it for free if they just put their own url in the qr code directly (if they knew it was possible, of course. They're nontechnical). But then the other company keeps charging you money just to serve pointless 301s

Is it safe to get multiple chips? They’re about the size of a grain of rice, so it shouldn’t be too unwieldy to get chipped from a couple of different vendors at the same time. With a chip, GPS collar, maybe an AirTag, that’s about all you can do besides lots of training.

The chip will still be working after 24PetWatch is gone, you can enroll the same serial to more providers i.e. AKC Reunite.

Or your city when you register your pet

there's no point in getting another chip. the existing chip will still work, you can just register the data with another database.

The microchip stores nothing but a serial number. I don’t quite understand the design that you would need a vendor to maintain a database between the serial and owner information, why not just store owner phone number like a traditional dog tag?

Dog tags are easy to replace. Microchips are not. Having a level of indirection allows the meaningful contact information to be updated as needed.

It's a permanent primary key into "an" owner database. Unfortunately, there are 40+ databases as there are that many registration companies. I don't even know if there's a unified interface to query all of them simultaneously. Does anyone know how the queries work if a pet be registered in some small or obscure registry that's not supported by every shelter/agency?

You don't want the chip to be reprogrammable or wipeable.

it's not useless. it just produces a number that is stored on a database. you can register it with another database if needed, although it would have been good if someone could transfer the records from the ailing company.

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