Today, pets. Tomorrow, people?

-- NWO Fido (@ .), August 03, 1999

Answers

Doggone....what a REVELATION!

-- citizen (lost@sea.com), August 03, 1999.

We have them in Australia for all cats and dogs. Difficult to see the relevance to Y2K however, unless it is in the category of embedded chips.

RonD

-- Ron Davis (rdavis@ozemail.com.au), August 03, 1999.

Or the more specialized sub-category of "empetted" chips. I hear there's a big controversy brewing over this issue in Australia. Lots of debate as to whether Fido's ID chips are date-sensitive. They're calling it the "K9Y2k" problem. Can you verify this Ron?

-- CD (not@here.com), August 03, 1999.

Pedigreed chips, and vaccination record chips.

C

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), August 04, 1999.

CD said "Lots of debate as to whether Fido's ID chips are date- sensitive. They're calling it the "K9Y2k" problem. Can you verify this Ron? "

-- There are a few different manufactures of pet id chips. I only spoke to the company that manufactured the chips we used for our dogs. For this particular brand, I was told that there are no date codes embedded or anything along those lines. Info at their website indicated that the chip is passive, and only interacts with a scanner.

A lot of folks think these chips will work as 'transmitters' to track down lost pets. But that's not the case. Perhaps there are some chips out there developed that do, but I'm sure they'd be a lot more expensive to use. (Which reminds me of another misconception out there about 'tracking transmitters': ankle bracelet electronic monitoring of inmates. Yes they wear a transmitter, but it only transmits to their phone which is hooked to a computer to verify that the inmate is still in range. If out of range or if tampering happens, the computer is alerted. But if they run, the bracelet transmitter does not put out a trackable signal...).

One other thing about the microchips and pets-- because of something I read on this forum a while back, I also asked if magnets caused any problems with scrambling or erasing a chip. Like when a credit card is magnetized and gets wiped out. The manufacture indicated that magnets should not cause any scrambling or erasing of the chip data.

FWIW

-- winter wondering (winterwondering@yahoo.com), August 04, 1999.