Peircing/tattooing your pet cruel?

[Catlady711]

Microchipping is from all outward appearances not a painful experience. Dogs and cats receive them in the scruff of their necks usually or a bit lower down a larger gauge needle is used but not that much larger.

Microchip needles are very large! Where I work the vets refuse to microchip without tranquilizing the pet first. When an owner balks at doing that they brings up one of the needles to show them and they readily agree then.

All vet clinics and shelters have a list of the codes used for tattooes so if a person finds a cat or a dog and calls any clinic or shelter, the code can be looked up to find out which vet clinic or shelter did the tattoo and then from there the owner can be found.

Not all places have a list of codes for tatoos. In our area (at least 5 counties worth anyways) we don't have any type of system to keep track of tatoos. We only have maybe 5-6 tatooed dogs that come in out of all the animals we see, and no one knows what the tatoos mean or how to track them down, all the tatooed ones were strays and not all were spayed/neutered.

Dog tattooing for ID was common -- BEFORE microchipping was developed. (OK, back in the dinnosaur age). Very few vets do it anymore, the microchip is more reliable, when he took her to the vet for the spay, the vet explained he doesn't tatoo anymore, it is all microchipping.

Around here microchipping is the only ID method we use, not just the place I work for either. Microchips can be scanned by any vet/shelter, and there is a national database for each company that keeps the info for each microchipped pet. Our computer system doesn't have any means of tracking tatoos and as far as I know there are no national data bases for tatoos, although I can't say that part for a fact.