Many cats have been located and returned to their owners even months after they became lost thanks to their tattoos. While microchipping is an exciting new idea in animal identification, tattoos have several advantages over microchips. Anyone can read a tattoo, anywhere. Microchips require a scanner, and not all scanners read all microchips effectively. Microchips can migrate under the animal's skin, making them difficult or impossible to find.
Tattoos stay put.
The owner of a microchipped animal must have the animal scanned to be assured the chip is still locatable, the owner of a tattooed animal needs only to look in the ear. Perhaps microchipping technology will get better, but for the time being tattoos work quite well. To have your pet tattooed, bring it to the Animal Shelter along with a picture ID of you, during business hours. If you have a tattooed pet and you move or change your phone number, let us know so we can keep our database up to date. Send mail to our WebKeeper with questions or comments about this web site.