Peircing/tattooing your pet cruel?

[Emeraldgreen]

One of the companies that I am familiar with is AVID. I looked at their site just now and the needle is listed as a 12 gauge needle. Looking at the photo of the needle, it is the one used at the clinic and it definitely is bigger than a vaccine syringe and I think you're right Giselle, it would depend on the pain tolerance of the animal. What I remember is that there wasn't any yelping or painful noises coming from the animals and there wasn't any sedation used or glue and it was all done so quickly, all within less than a minute that maybe it just appeared to be relatively painfree but just because it was fast and quiet should not be an indicator for pain and I could be completely wrong. In any case, I don't like animals to suffer, not even for a moment and there is no way I can honestly know what that needle would feel like and I'm sure it would hurt like hell if I got a shot with it. Most of my pets have tattooes instead of microchips that they received while they were already under anesthesia for spay/neuter. It's quite a bit cheaper than the microchip and reasonably effective here in B.C.
I guess my main objective is to help animals get back home when they're lost because of my work in that area for the past 3 years and the microchip is a tool to help with that but for smaller pets, and who knows, maybe all pets, it may be an uncomfortable option. As mentioned before, I hope they will come up with a teenie chip that will be virtually painless. That would be great.

[IRescue452]

Tatoos might have different systems that not all can read, but at least on immediate sight you can tell that the animal had an owner once and/or was altered. A facility can read microchips because they own the machine, but a regular person who finds the dog doesn't own the equipment to reada chip. A tattoo is a major identification mark visible to all.