Many animal shelters aren’t using the right methods and techniques to scan pets for microchips, missing out on an opportunity to get that pet back home.
In his Maddie’s InstituteSM webcast, The First 60 Minutes: Animal Sheltering’s Critical Hour, Brian A. DiGangi, DVM, MS, DABVP, a clinical assistant professor of shelter medicine at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, says the secret to getting it right can be summed up with the acronym “SCAN.”
From the webcast:
S is for slow: “You want to go very slowly when you’re scanning an animal; remember, no more than half a foot per second.”
C is for close: “You want to hold the scanner very close to the animal. Think back to the study where they showed as an animal’s body weight increased the sensitivity of the microchip scanner decreased, so you want to be sure that you’re holding it really close to those microchips so you can get a good read on them.”
A is for area: “You want to cover a whole lot of area… . You want to start up by the shoulder blades, where you would expect the microchip to be, but microchips can migrate, so you want to be sure that you cover the whole body of the animal. So, it’s recommended to go down a snakelike pattern down the back of the animal. Turn the scanner around and go down each side of the animal as well.
“N is for next steps: “It’s real important to have some next steps laid out in your intake protocol. What is somebody supposed to do when they find a microchip? It does no good if they’ve found it and then they don’t know what to do after that. So, if a chip is found, there should be a plan for contacting the microchip registry company and trying to track down that owner. If there is no chip scanned, for me the next plan is to scan them again, because maybe I missed it.”
The discussion of microchip scanning, including video demonstrations of both good and poor scanning techniques, begins at around the 11:11 mark in the recording of Dr. DiGangi’s webcast on the Maddie’s Institute website.