Yesterday evening I received a contact e-mail from my website which read:
Name:
TREVOR MORGAN
Email:
MORGANTA@CHESTERFIELD.GOV
Subject:
FOUND DOG WITH YOUR MICROCHIP
Message:
HELLO I AM WITH CHESTERFIELD ANIMAL SERVICES IN CHESTERFIELD VA. I
FOUND A DOG WITH YALLS MICROCHIP. I WAS HOPING YOU COULD HELP ME GET
THIS LITTLE GUY HOME PLEASE CALL ME AT 8049295445
I do get a fair amount of junk mail and at first I was suspicious. While we microchipped puppies for years it has been some time since I bred a litter at home, plus all of our pups were originally on the west coast. Tom convinced me that I should call the number. Trevor Morgan answered the phone and so I asked him for a description of the dog. “A black and white corgi” made a believer out of me. He gave me a chip number. I found my excel spreadsheet on my computer, looked it up, and the chip number belongs to Baledwr Don’t Make Me Blue, a cryptic merle bitch originally owned by Kate Roberson who moved to the east coast from Idaho. The dog was scared and wet and had apparently, judging from her collar, escaped from an electric fence during Hurricane Mathew’s pass.
I knew that Kate had placed Blue, but did not remember to whom. Tom and I got on FaceBook and started PMing friends. It turns out that Traci Genaw, who owns Blue’s litter sister Sedona, is a Facebook friend with the new owner as is Kim Kiefer. They gave me the owner’s name and after some searching around also came up with a phone number or two (one was right).
I called Mr. Morgan and gave him the new owner’s name (“oh, I know her: she’s XXXX’s daughter, they have a horse farm . . .”) and he said that he would deliver Blue home right away. Then I called Blue’s owner (also a “Kim”) who had been out frantically scouring the streets for hours to let her know that she was on her way safely home.
And to cap it off, Mr. Morgan called me again from his office once he returned from the successful delivery. I am beyond pleased and grateful to him for tracking me down and for making sure that Blue got home.
Blue as a puppy in 2006 – Carbon x Phoebe.
I have always used chips that were registered to me first as the breeder so that even if the new owner never registered it that it could be traced back to me.
This is not the first time that I have been called by animal control due to microchips being scanned. Several years ago C-Myste Oscar Braveheart and C-Myste Day and Night Isabella took off out of an open gate in Burlingame California. Their owners were able to retrieve them from animal control very quickly.