Your pet's microchip may now be useless after chip company goes out of business
22 points by cpeterso
by tomyedwab
1 subcomments
The title is misleading: the chip isn't useless, it is basically NFC and can be read just fine. The number on it can be looked up in a registry to notify the owner of a lost pet. I believe there is nothing preventing you from registering the same number with multiple registries. Hope that helps.
by ggm
1 subcomments
This has happened before. I think given the legalisms around pets, ownership, responsibility, all of the chip registry companies should have been required to put the data into escrow, with a recovery plan and a handler of last resort in the form of a CSV file or something.
by treesknees
1 subcomments
Is it safe to get multiple chips? They’re about the size of a grain of rice, so it shouldn’t be too unwieldy to get chipped from a couple of different vendors at the same time. With a chip, GPS collar, maybe an AirTag, that’s about all you can do besides lots of training.
by yftsui
3 subcomments
The microchip stores nothing but a serial number. I don’t quite understand the design that you would need a vendor to maintain a database between the serial and owner information, why not just store owner phone number like a traditional dog tag?
by burnt-resistor
0 subcomment
In the US, there are something like 40+ pet chip registration companies. The problem of fragmentation is that the portable NFC chip ID number needs to be associated with each of them. This is dubious in the age of private equity and a total market failure. This is something that should be run as a single nonprofit to avoid this useless and unnecessary confusion.
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