All cats will have to be chipped, according to new legislation. Failure to chip a cat could lead to a £500 fine.
The problem is, how is this going to be policed? Even someone taking their cat to the vet for some work could claim it's not their cat and they acted purely out of altruism. There again, the vet could say you have to pay for the chipping, else he or she doesn't go back home with you and goes straight to a cats' home, not that this is the kindest act.
Take Railway, the feral cat we feed; there's no way in hell we could get him into a cage to take him to a vet for chipping, except if he were incapacitated by illness. He's certainly not our cat - he's feral.
Given the legislation kicks in at 20 weeks, chipping can't be verified at kitten inoculation, which occurs at 9 weeks and 12 weeks. It could be picked up at annual booster vaccinations, but not everyone gives their cats annual boosters.
It's rather difficult to prove a cat belongs to someone, unless it has a collar with an address tag, and very few cats will put up with one of those. A cat chooses you; you don't choose a cat - if it doesn't like you, your environment or what you're feeding it, it will pretty quickly bugger off and seek someone else to sponge off, and that's usually us.
There again, chipping a cat doesn't cost an arm and a leg - somewhere between £9 and £20.
The biggest benefit of chips, in my opinion, is that they can selectively activate electronic cat flaps, barring unwanted interlopers from your house.
People often think that if a chipped pet becomes someone else's, the chip has to be reprogrammed, but the chip contains only a number. It's the registration database that contains the name and address associated with that number. What pet owners often forget to do is to have the database changed when they become the new owner of a cat, or move house.
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