With animal shelters in Johnson County facing a capacity crisis, shelter directors and pet advocates are asking people to get their pets microchipped to make room for animals without homes.
Daily, shelters take in lost pets that could be easily reunited with their owner if they had a microchip implanted with their information, said Melissa Kreisler, owner of Melissa’s Second Chances in Shawnee.
The problem is that many owners don’t, or at least don’t keep them up to date.
“About 50% of people don’t register their microchips. It’s so frustrating,” Kreisler said. “Or maybe they register it and then they move and they don’t update it. They change their phone number, they don’t update it, so then you’ve got to do some detective work.”
Glenn Golden, who runs the Lost and Found Pets Of Johnson County, has distributed hundreds of pet microchip scanners in the county. He sees microchips as crucial to helping get pets back home.
“Thousands of pets are scanned just by good Samaritans, good citizens and returned home (per year),” he said. “We reunite about eight animals a day, not all from chip scanning, but from all the different (Facebook lost pet) pages.”
Microchips are cheaper than ever
With decades of experience in the work of animal shelters, Kreisler said she remembers when microchips were large and cost-prohibitive.
“We’ve come so far. Now, they’re just this teeny, tiny little thing. But what an important thing,” she said. “And it’s fairly cost-effective anymore. I see chip clinics all the time where they’re offering them for low cost.”
Since 2023, the Spay & Neuter Collaborative of Kansas City has been working with shelters across the Kansas City area, holding events and providing low-cost resources to help spay, neuter and chip pets.
“It was me just seeing this shelter crisis, and thinking, ‘What can I do?’ It’s a community effort, and the shelters have done a fantastic job,” said Tam Singer, founder of the Spay & Neuter Collaborative of Kansas City, in a previous interview.
Shelters asking owners to keep chip info updated
When it comes to reuniting lost pets and their owners, an out-of-date microchip makes the task even more difficult, Golden said.
“We see a lot of sad situations like when people change their phone number or address, they need to update their chip,” he said. “We will scan a dog (and see) the last time the chip was updated was in 2020 … And they’ve since changed their phone number, changed their address. We do an internet search. But if we can’t find them, then there’s no way of reaching them.”
He added: “It’s just a shame because all they had to do was log in or call the chip company and say, ‘By the way, I got a new phone number. My old phone number is disconnected.'”
That problem might potentially get worse. On Tuesday, Texas-based microchip and registration company Save This Life was listed as inactive Tuesday, according to a USA Today report.
Since the company gave its customers and shelters no notice of its closure, Kansas City area pet rescues and shelters, like KC Pet Project, are scrambling to get the word out to have people re-register their pets’ microchips.
“If your pet is registered through Save This Life and were to go missing there is no way for any shelter or veterinary hospital to locate your contact information if the pet is found,” a KC Pet Project post on Facebook stated.
In order to determine if a pet’s microchip was registered through Save This Life, people are asked to go to the American Animal Hospital Association’s website and enter the number of their pet’s chip.
If it is registered through Save This Life, then pet owners are asked to re-register through a different microchip company.
Microchipping pets helps shelters
Since 2020, shelters in the Kansas City area have seen a drop in adoptions, especially for big dogs, Kreisler said.
Having to take on and potentially re-home pets because their owner didn’t microchip them adds to shelters’ ongoing capacity issues.
“I just wish that everybody would microchip (their pets). It would tremendously cut down on the animals at animal shelters,” Kreisler said. “A lot of people don’t know where to go to look, and then your dog ends up serving a five-day stray hold, and then it gets adopted out, and you don’t even know where it went.”
It’s common for owners of a lost pet who wasn’t microchipped to discover that several months earlier, their pet was posted on a shelter social media and was adopted by another family.
“I have seen dozens of cases (like that),” he said. “They call the shelter (four months later) and say, ‘That’s my dog.’ Well, it’s not your dog anymore. They can’t hold it anymore. They say, ‘Well, give me the new owner information.’ Well, there’s privacy laws that you can’t share that information, and it wouldn’t be fair to the new owner that’s had the pet and brought it in and acclimated it to their family for the last three, four months.”
Where to go to get a chip scanned
Most veterinarians and animals shelters are able to install and scan microchips in pets, said Emily Burrows, current outreach lead for The Rescue Project in Overland Park.
In addition, a number of individuals have chip scanners available by contacting the Lost And Found Pets of Johnson County Facebook page.
The important thing to remember is to keep the microchip updated and if a pet gets lost, to not lose faith.
“There’s been success stories where an animal was missing for five, 10 years and somehow ends up across the country, and finally, they get that chip scanned, and lo and behold, the phone number still worked,” she said. “As long as you register that chip and that animal, they’re going to contact you. They’re going to get good information, and they can contact you, and you can get your animal back.”
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