Microchip scan

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The unique identification number on a pet microchip can be read by a scanner, enabling the finder of a lost pet to track down its owner — provided the chip is registered, the owner information is up to date and the registry hasn't gone out of business.

As veterinarians grapple with the unannounced closure of a pet microchip company in the United States, one in Australia also has mysteriously gone to ground, further testing confidence in tracking systems meant to help owners reunite with lost pets.

HomeSafeID operates one of Australia's seven pet microchip registries, which together hold details on millions of dogs and cats Down Under.

Public confirmation that HomeSafeID has been struggling appeared Feb. 5, when the host of the company's website posted a message to the site's homepage stating that the company had stopped paying its bills and that the site consequently "is likely to go offline in the future." When that happens, the message warned, all pet registration data on the site will be inaccessible.

The Australian Veterinary Association (AVA), shelter organizations and at least one Australian state are urging pet owners to review their registry provider and, if it's HomeSafeID, transition to another one — fast.

Pet microchips, which are implanted under an animal's skin, each have a unique identification number. To link the number to the pet owner, the chip must be registered with the person's name and contact details. Registries typically are provided by the company that marketed the chip or by a government entity. The chip number of a found pet can be read by a scanner, enabling the finder to contact the associated registry to connect with the owner, provided the owner's information is up-to-date — and the registry service hasn't disappeared.

That latter, seemingly unlikely, scenario has been playing out in the U.S., where the Texas-based chip company Save This Life Inc. in January stopped issuing chip information on its website, confirming months-long speculation online that it was in difficulty. Texas state records show Save This Life's right to conduct business "was ended as the result of a tax forfeiture or an administrative forfeiture." Its CEO, Chance White, did not respond to calls, texts and emails from the VIN News Service requesting comment.

Back-to-back incidents apparently are coincidental

Although the situation in Australia is similar, VIN News found no information suggesting that Save This Life and HomeSafeID are connected.

Australian Securities and Investments Commission records show that HomeSafeID is based in Perth, the capital of the state of Western Australia, and was registered in 2009. The company's sole owner and director is identified as Matthew Clune. No contact number is provided for Clune. Calls to the number listed on HomeSafeID's website went unanswered.

The documents also show that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the state of Queensland — a respected animal welfare charity — was once a major shareholder in HomeSafeID but sold its stake in 2020. The Queensland RSPCA didn't reply to a request for comment. On its website, the charity says it can help pet owners find adopted pets' microchip numbers and recommends pets registered with HomeSafeID be switched to a different registry.

Clune also is the director of a related company, Pet Electronic Tags. According to an alert issued by the AVA, Pet Electronic Tags has gone into liquidation but HomeSafeID has not.

Daniel Bredenkamp, the executive director of professional services firm Pitcher Partners, confirmed to VIN News that he was appointed by the Australian Taxation Office as the liquidator of Pet Electronic Tags after it failed to pay its tax bills. Pet Electronic Tags and HomeSafeID appear to be related entities, he said, with Pet Electronic Tags holding their liabilities. He has boxes of pet microchips in his office that he is trying to sell on behalf of Pet Electronic Tags, as required by his role as liquidator.

Bredenkamp is familiar with the situation involving Save This Life in the U.S. "The circumstances are very similar — where we, at this stage have a director who has gone to ground and is not answering any calls," he said, adding that he's unaware of a business connection between the Australian and American companies.

System vulnerabilities exposed

Their concurrent failures demonstrate vulnerabilities in national microchip frameworks that have no clear rules on how private registries should interact, according to Dr. Bronwyn Orr, a past president of the AVA who has blogged about the HomeSafeID fallout.

"The key problem is that we have a mandatory requirement in every Australian state and territory except the Northern Territory to microchip your pet," she said in an interview. "So it's a legal requirement to microchip, but then there's no clear regulation around how that data should be managed."

In a demonstration of the patchwork of rules that exist in Australia, two of its eight states and territories — New South Wales and South Australia — mandate that chipped pets be registered with their respective government-owned registries. (Of the seven registries in Australia, two are government-owned and five, including HomeSafeID, are privately owned).

The state of Victoria, for its part, safeguards the data in private registries by requiring them to supply the government with their data. (The state confirmed that it has received all HomeSafeID records for pets in Victoria.)

The situation in Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory is less clear.

"We could have another private registry go bankrupt tomorrow. We could have two go bankrupt tomorrow," Orr said. "And there's no consistent rules about what happens to that data. This has shone a light on the fact that it's an area of weakness in the current system."

As a potential solution, Orr would like to see the leaders of state and territory governments hash out a common regulatory framework.

"At the very least, we need the state governments to come together and come up with some sort of guidelines around what would happen," she said. "It might be as simple as agreeing to do what the Victorian government did, which is that they would get a copy of that data ... and maybe there could be a rule that you must pass on the data to another provider."