When Justin Mason moved from Ireland to the US, he wanted to take his cat -- so, as required under the pet passport cross-border travel scheme, he had him microchipped.
The pet passport scheme, which was introduced in 2004, relies on radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to make it work. Simple, you might think: Put a chip in each animal and away you go. But the reality is a dog's dinner, as Mason, a programmer, realized when he got to the US and discovered that vets could not read the cat's chip.
To him, it smacked of a badly managed IT project -- which, as he discovered, is not far off the mark.
Imagine a company-wide information-technology scheme where almost no one understands the new technology and its capabilities or weaknesses, where every department makes different decisions on hardware and software, where no one is required to adhere to standards and none of the departmental systems talk to each other. Substitute nations for departments, and you have the present system of pet microchipping.
A bit of Googling later, Mason, author of SpamAssassin, the spam-filter program, discovered why. Europe uses International Standards Organization (ISO) regulation chips, which operate at a frequency of 132.5kHz (also known as FDX-B chips), while the US uses an older style, 125kHz chip (known as FDX-A). Most scanners in the US read only FDX-A chips -- though some are unable even to read all the 125kHz chips in the US market.
And in a move that has infuriated organizations such as the American Humane Society and prompted US federal legislation, chips made by American Veterinary Identification Devices (Avid) are encrypted and, in the US, can't be read by non-Avid scanners unless other companies license the technology.
To make sure customs agents could read his cat's chip to match him to his pet passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of some US$360.
"I didn't want to risk the cat being impounded for six months' quarantine at London-Heathrow airport," he said.
Not that the headaches end there. A chip is only as dependable as the database it links to. However, there are many databases which often don't share information. Additionally, a foreign chip -- which may be only as "foreign" as a standard European ISO chip but in a British dog that gets lost on holiday in Ireland -- offers no obvious information regarding its origin.
The anxious owner must rely on officials at a pound or shelter being diligent and hunting down both the nationality of the chip and the database it is linked to. In frustration, European animal welfare groups and vets have set up two services to try to overcome this: (petmaxx.org) and (europetnet.com). Enter a chip number and these will search national databases to try to identify the pet's owner.
So why the mess? From Mason's perspective, it's a classic IT project gone awry.
"Because it's at the bleeding edge of technology, no one really understands how to use this stuff," he said.
Finbar Heslin, a vet in the Irish Republic who has worked to try to streamline Irish microchipping standards, said part of the problem is that RFID chips have been developed for a different market.
"The idea behind microchipping is excellent. The downside is that you're taking the technologies from the logistics industry and trying to apply them to animals," Heslin said.
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