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Microchips inserted under the skin of animals each have a unique code. A found stray's chip number can be read by a scanner and the animal traced to its owner — provided the owner submitted the number and contact information to a microchip registry that is in operation.

Someone was just trying to do the right thing by a lost dog when the staff at Sewell Animal Hospital in Oklahoma made a dismaying discovery about a pet microchip company called Save This Life, Inc.

In January, a client found a schnauzer mix and brought the stray in to check whether it had an identifying microchip. It did.

Dr. Ashley Sewell, the hospital owner, said such scenarios usually unfold this way: "Staff contacts chip company. We reunite dog with home. Everything's great."

But not this time.

Days passed, and the hospital didn't hear back from Save This Life. Emails and calls went unanswered. A contact form on the company's website delivered an error message. Eventually, its listed phone number didn't ring through.

Frustratingly, the website showed that the dog's chip was registered. The owner information existed but was completely inaccessible without the company's assistance. The dog has been waiting out these weeks in limbo, staying with the person who found it, presumably with a home but no way to get there.

Microchips are used worldwide as a means of reuniting lost pets with their owners. The chip, about the size of a grain of rice, is placed by a veterinarian or shelter employee under an animal's skin, usually around the shoulders. The pet's owner registers the number and their contact information, typically with the company associated with the chip.

When a pet is found, a scanner is used to "read" the chip's number through a radio signal. The number can be matched to the pet's details via the associated registry. The owner can be reached if their contact details are up to date.

Save This Life has been in business since 2012, Texas state records show, and its chips are distributed nationally. The company touted its system as making information retrieval easier: Simply text the microchip code to the company, and it would contact the owner.

Sewell's practice, which also uses Save This Life microchips, is returning its remaining supply to the company's sole distributor, Covetrus, which is aware of the problem.

"We have recently stopped selling the product as Save This Life resolves certain customer issues," a Covetrus spokesperson told the VIN News Service by email.

Sewell's own dogs have Save This Life microchips, which brings her worry home. "If my dog disappears tomorrow, they're not going to be able to get ahold of me," she said. "And that's just really frustrating."

Now she's researching alternative suppliers, of which there are dozens in the U.S.

"At this point in time, I have anxiety about making sure I'm picking a chip company that surely won't go through this same disappearing act again," Sewell said.

Complaints submitted to the Better Business Bureau stating difficulty communicating with Save This Life demonstrate that issues with the company date back more than a year. Things came to a head in January, when veterinarians like Sewell noticed that the online form that gives users chip information started delivering an error message.

Save This Life has not posted any statement on its website or social media to respond to the concerns or explain its situation. Texas state records show it having a "franchise tax involuntarily ended" status. This means Save This Life's right to conduct business in Texas "was ended as the result of a tax forfeiture or an administrative forfeiture by Texas Secretary of State."

On Jan. 24, the American Animal Hospital Association removed Save This Life from a list of brands that participate in its online microchip lookup tool, which searches connected registries to determine whether any have owner information on a given chip.

"Our staff tried, repeatedly, to contact the organization," AAHA CEO Garth Jordan told VIN News in an email. "None of the attempts to reach this company by our team, both by phone and email, were successful. The phone number gets fast busy signals. Emails got auto replies with no personal response."

VIN News was unable to ascertain how many pets have Save This Life chips. The company CEO, Chance White, did not respond to multiple calls, texts and emails asking for a comment.

Microchip hassles and benefits

The U.S. pet microchipping industry has had multiple difficulties over the years. Competition among microchip companies led to chips having different radio frequency signals, a big problem before the advent of universal scanners that can detect multiple frequencies. Other parts of the world have adopted an ISO standard, wherein all chips use the same frequency, but there's no such uniformity in the American microchip marketplace.

Another obstacle is the lack of a central microchip registry. Though AAHA created a central lookup, not all chip companies participate. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, while there are different chip registries, each can provide guidance about where a chipped animal may be registered.

Despite the snags, veterinarians and advocates continue to push for microchipping because evidence suggests it offers lost pets a better chance of making it home. A study published in 2009 in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association found that lost dogs with microchips were returned to their owners at more than twice the rate of dogs without chips.

But the return rate was still low — barely more than 50 percent. Another issue with the identification system is that simply having a microchip implanted isn't enough. The owner of the pet must then register the chip, sometimes for an additional fee, and keep their contact details current.

Outdated microchip information is a complication that Jacob Horning tackles regularly. Horning has been a volunteer microchip tracker since he helped with animal rescue during Hurricane Harvey, which struck Texas and Louisiana in 2017. Today, Horning's role in the microchip landscape is self-designed and unique: He assists shelters in tracking owners who are hard to find, usually because the registered information is obsolete or the chip was never registered. Horning sleuths out the current owners using web searches and social media.

Some cases take but five minutes to crack; others, days. In 2024, he said, he worked on 291 cases and was able to reconnect pets with their owners in all but five.

Horning first became aware of problems with Save This Life a few months ago through a friend who was having trouble contacting the company. He began reaching out to the company persistently, hoping to at least be able to get them to transfer the records to another place, to no avail.

"Having a chip company that doesn't answer the phone ... I think it's just time to give over records," Horning said.

Re-registration is a solution

In the absence of direction from Save This Life, Horning and others recommend that affected owners re-register their pets as soon as possible with a different company. The dozens of microchip registries to choose from can be narrowed down with the help of a veterinarian. Re-registry itself is simple and can be done online or by phone. Some registries charge a fee, up to about $30, but some are free.

Holly Robinson, head receptionist at Wildcat Valley Animal Clinic in Indiana, said her clinic's staff first noticed issues with Save This Life last summer, when they contacted the company with a request to change a client's email address and didn't hear back. At that time, she said, the website still worked. It wasn't until January, when clinic staff looking up chip numbers got error messages, that they realized something was off.

"All of a sudden, they were just gone," Robinson said. She realized that if one of their own clients lost a pet, the clinic would not be able to get ahold of Save This Life, whose chips it had used exclusively.

Now the clinic is reaching out to clients to spread the word and encourage them to register their microchips elsewhere. Those clients who don't have the chip number recorded are invited to bring their pet in to be scanned.

This story has been changed to correct the description of AAHA's microchip lookup tool.