High-Tech Pet Pals

They flutter from telephone poles all over the city: homemade fliers with blurry photos of lost dogs or cats, posted by desperate pet lovers.

Now, the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation believes that it may have a technological solution to the problem of wandering pets: computer chips.

By implanting a chip the size of a grain of rice under the skin of a pet’s neck, the department hopes to reunite lost pets and their owners and cut down on the number of animals that it must kill.

Lost dogs and cats implanted with chips can be scanned like groceries and more easily reunited with owners. “We would like to see every animal have a microchip,” said Peter Persic, a department spokesman.

The chips are inserted with a needle and are considered safe and painless by veterinarians. “I’ve watched a dog’s face when it’s being done and it doesn’t even flinch,” said Jack Nylund, a senior system analyst for the department.

The chips have been used in Ventura County and the city of San Diego and by several other agencies across the country. But Los Angeles’ interest marks a significant step in the evolution of electronic animal identification.

The city had held off using the chips in the past, partly because the fiercely competitive companies that make the chips were not manufacturing compatible technologies. That meant that a shelter with one brand of scanner might not pick up the code from another company’s chip, Nylund said.

But, Nylund said, newly compatible technologies have largely eliminated that problem. So the City Council’s Public Safety Committee voted unanimously Monday to approve a contract with American Veterinary Identification Devices (AVID) of Norco to install scanners at the city’s six animal shelters. The scanners can read all kinds of chips.

Under the program, the city would implant AVID chips in all dogs and cats adopted from shelters, adding $15 to the adoption fee. And--going one step beyond San Diego’s extensive program--the city would offer implant services to the public for $20. The measure, which would cost the city nothing, must be approved by the full council.

Eventually, Nylund said, microchips may substantially reduce the number of animals--60,000 yearly--euthanized by the department. The number represents more than 70% of all impounded animals.

On a broader scale, the city’s move toward microchips as a standard tool for animal control indicates that the chips may become commonplace.

In San Diego, where animals adopted from shelters have been implanted with microchips for about three years, reunions between owners and lost pets now occur more often, said Lt. Danielle Spilker of the city’s Department of Animal Control.

Since San Diego endorsed the chips, waves of pet owners have rushed to implant them in their animals, Spilker said. “We used to get really excited when we heard those beeps from the scanner, but not anymore,” Spilker said. By contrast, in Los Angeles, scanning now performed by shelters run by the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-L.A. turns up very few animals with chips.

“This is a step in the right direction,” said the group’s president, Madeline Bernstein. “In a perfect world, every animal would have the same chip which could be read by the same scanner.”

Bernstein and animal control officials said that microchips will not replace pets’ collar tags or ear tags, which are needed to show that animals have received rabies shots and to identify pets, since only shelters now have scanners.

But AVID’s Burns said the industry is finally on the verge of microchipping the nation’s tens of millions of pets, only a few hundred thousand of which now have implants. The change could revolutionize shelter practices nationwide, he said.

His and other companies hope to expand microchip implants to farm animals--a development that he contends would improve the tracking of dangerous diseases, like Hong Kong’s “bird flu” and Europe’s “mad cow” disease. Already, microchips have been an important development in tracking wild birds and salmon returning to their ancestral spawning pools.

Not all pet owners will embrace the concept, Nylund said. Already, some people at public hearings have recoiled at the political implications of the technology. “There is something spooky about it and everyone realizes it,” he said.