The company, called Chloe Standard, wants to streamline the process of finding a stray pet's owner, and increase the chances that a chip implanted under the animal's skin can actually be detected, read and used.

Gaps in microchip identification services are a long-standing problem, and well understood in some companion-animal circles. But most pet owners have no idea, and their veterinarians may or may not know about the problem in detail. Owners are urged simply to have microchips placed in their pets so that the animals may be returned quickly and safely should they become lost or run away.

What they're not typically told is that a person who reads a pet's chip may not be able to access the animal's identifying information without having to call multiple competing registries. And that even then, in rare cases, they may have trouble finding the owner's whereabouts. Nor are pet owners necessarily told that a given scanner may be incapable of reading an individual animal's chip. Even the best scanners -- including those touted as "universal" -- miss some chips.

The root of the trouble is not flawed technology, but business interests, patent protection and politics. "We need a new word for 'can of worms,' because it doesn't begin to describe this (situation)," said Olivia Sadlowski, founder and CEO of Chloe Standard, who named the company for her pug Chloe, a shelter adoptee.

Sadlowski stumbled into the world of microchips through an exchange with an online group of local pug aficionados. Someone had picked up a stray pug with no collar, and posted a query: what to do? Among the replies that flowed in, one asked if the pug was chipped; another noted the need for a scanner to find out.

A volunteer with several shelters in her area, Sadlowski offered to round up a scanner. "One of the shelters said, 'Well, this scanner only reads a certain type of chip, and if this dog has a different chip, it won't read anything,' " Sadlowski recounted. "I said, 'You've got to be kidding me.' That started an intensive, almost-six months of researching, finding out all the problems of microchipping." (The lost dog, meantime, was quickly reunited with its owner after the owner walked down the street calling its name. No scanning necessary.)

Sadlowski, who's built a career working with Silicon Valley startups, started Chloe Standard with other pet owners and advocates, some of them engineers. One of the company's goals is to make scanners more accessible to the public by placing them in locations that are open for longer hours than veterinary offices and shelters. The details are still under development. The company also hopes to start a national campaign on microchip awareness. The message to pet owners would be to have their pets scanned regularly to be sure the chips are readable, to remember to register the chips and make sure the registry information is up-to-date.

As a first step toward building a more coherent microchip identification system, the company on Tuesday introduced a beta version of an Internet search engine, www.checkthechip.com that matches microchip codes to their respective manufacturers. Anyone who scans an animal now can type in the resulting code and learn in moments which database likely holds information on the animal's owner, potentially eliminating the need to call around to multiple registries.

Read the rest of this story from VIN News Service.

Photo credit: www.scoop.co.nz