Your Puppy Must Have ID!

You can be the most attentive, loving, and responsible puppy owner ever. But despite all that, your puppy might still go missing. If she does, she may well end up in an animal shelter, where almost a third of the many millions of dogs they gather up every year are house pets who somehow got separated from those that love them. If the owners of these poor creatures cannot be located and no other loving family decides to take them home, then they are all but certain to be euthanized not long after they are picked up on the street. Your own puppy can easily avoid this fate, however, by simply having some form of ID on her at all times.

The traditional method of doggie ID is a tag hanging from her collar. This tag should have the basic information necessary for anyone who finds your missing puppy to get in touch with you. That would include your name, address and phone number. This information can also be engraved on a metal plate attached to the surface of the collar, or it can woven into the material of a personalized collar.

But collars are not foolproof. They can be lost or removed. Two other methods of ID do not have this problem. Some owners have their puppy tattooed with a number that is registered with a national group that keeps track of such things, like I.D. Pet. The problem with this of course is that a lot of people who might find your missing puppy would have no idea what that number means. You could also have your name, address and phone number tattooed on your puppy, but that's a lot of data to place on a small animal (and it would be out of date the moment you moved or changed your number). Some also say the tattoo fades with time.

The most modern puppy ID method is to have a microchip about the size of a grain of rice implanted between the puppy's shoulder blades. That chip can be scanned with a device like a grocery store scanner, which would turn up a number registered with a microchip manufacturer who has all the information about the puppy. The average animal shelter has such a scanner, but the average person who might find your dog doesn't. So the best solution is a combination of solutions: a microchip for the shelter, collar tags for the good Samaritan who finds your wayward puppy and brings her to safety.

Pet Places offers resources on how to choose which puppy to buy and how to take care of puppies.

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