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- Jan 29, 2008
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I don't know what you're getting at there.
I donno... calling a shelter when your pet is missing makes common sense to me. If someone had found my cat, brought it in, and the shelter had no idea it was my cat, then I'd be out a cat. One shelter I was in had a "Lost Animal" book and the other had a bulletain board. If someone brought in a cat with that description, they'd know how to get a hold of you. More often than not, most lost cats never made it to the shelter for whatever reason or found someplace else, but it's nice to have all your bases covered, right? Our cat got out one day and was gone for 8 hours. We called the shelter to report her missing and asked if they wanted a picture of her. Turns out most of the staff remember her and there was already a picture of her at the shelter.
Yes, my cat did get out. She had a collar but no ID/microchip. I was 16 at the time, we had the cat for about 6 months, it was our first, and I was still trying to convince my mom the importance of ID AND annual vet visits.
My personal experience with a shelter, as the finder of a lost animal, was that they were unsuccessful in connecting me with the owner, despite both of us calling the shelter multiple times about the same animal. The point being that you said someone was irresponsible if they don't even bother to look for their animal at the shelter--apparently even if they do look, they may not find the animal. Even if the animal has been reported. I would never rely on a shelter to know if my animal was there.
Re: fibrosarcomas: they are accurately referred to now as injection site fibrosarcomas, not vaccine-associated fibrosarcomas, because data suggests that they are associated with the trauma of injection, not always with adjuvant. Yes, the vaccine associated ones are usually characterized by macrophages that have phagocytosed adjuvant. However, I know pathologists who have seen fibrosarcomas in owned animals (not mice) that surrounded a microchip. I'm not implying that it's common, but as fibrosarcomas are highly invasive neoplasms and are very difficult to remove with clean margins, I would rather not take that risk. Remember, just because there's no study proving something happens does not mean it doesn't. Injection site fibrosarcomas in cats have only identified in the last 20 or so years, and microchips are much newer than that, so we can't expect to necessarily have data on this yet. If my cats were outdoors regularly, I might make a different choice regarding microchipping. If I could chip my cat in a distal limb, it might also be a different story.
When you say thousands of animals are reunited with their owners each month as a result of a microchip--where are those statistics from? How have you ensured that the animal was found and given to its owner solely because of the microchip? Are owners who microchip more likely to also put forth more effort in looking for lost animals? Lots of confounding variables here.
My cat that escaped did so while I was out of town, so I was not personally responsible for her getting out, although I obviously participated in finding her.