Anyone know of a manufacturer inventory of serial numbers of pet animal microchips distribution by country?
animals have been abandoned lately and the microchip numbers are not in national list. Surely manuacturers know which batches of numbers budge to a certain country, as do vehicle manufactures with VIN numbers.
This would assistance track down people who holiday, or return to own country abandoning animals. Any sincere give a hand appreciated.
Answers: Microchips usually have 10 to 15 character alpha numeric codes, although this vary slightly between different manufacturers and ages of chip in different countries. Certain digits in the code generally indicate the manufacturer, the veterinary surgery/ shelter, batch and country of deployment. Nearly all microchips follow an established set of ISO (11784 and 11785) standards, which ensure all scanners detect all microchips.
The major exception have been America, which did not select an open standard. Manufacturers in America initially competed to produce microchips designed to be detected by the manufacturer scanners only, operating on all sorts of different frequencies. After the dominant manufacturers begin to produce microchips on the same frequency they began to encrypt the numeric code stored on the microchip, making them impossible to read. It is still adjectives in the US to find shelters and vets with scanners that can't detect or read adjectives microchips. As a last resort an animal can be x-rayed to establish the presence of a chip.
Most countries have a national database system which the manufacturer feed all their data into and the dexterity to cross reference with any other database. e.g. a microchip from mainland Europe or Australia could be detected in the UK and cross referenced near Australian and other European databases until a match is found.
Most veterinary surgeries and charities will access this information through a helpline given by their chosen chip manufacturer, the Kennel Club's Petlog, or the Petback Bureau in the UK, and similar organisations will exist surrounded by other countries.
Wikipedia has a good, accurate chart of scanners and their reading capabilities, whether you are concerned about chip detection. Any of the vets or shelters in your nouns should be able to help you start an enquiry into questioning the databases. If you don't have much joy through this route it may be worth speaking directly to some of the manufacturers and organisations contained by other countries.
Since I live in the UK, I can only speak from my own experiences- we always call the manufacturer and they contacted the UK databases and those abroad for us, they were unbelievably informative.
Hope this helps.
