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I said goodbye to her today. Perhaps she would have lived naturally for a few more weeks, or even months, but it would not be a peaceful passing, but rather a painful, scary and drawn out one, filled with even more medication and vet visits, and I just didn’t want that ending for her. So Penny passed away today, in my arms, surrounded by the rest of her pack, in her home, in her favorite bed (appropriately designed with black, white and red sugar skulls), peacefully and without pain and fear. My husband and I always joked that Penny would not leave a beautiful corpse, because she lived life fully and had a multitude of scars and ailments to prove it. When we dressed her a few years ago as Frankenpenny and then this year as Darth Penny for Halloween, they were very fitting costumes -- one of our PetHub employees actually did a poster featuring Penny as Darth Penny. My brother told me earlier this week when I let him know we were saying goodbye to her today, that he had been convinced that Penny was going to be the world’s first cyborg-dog and live forever -- if only that were possible, huh?      I tried to count up how many surgeries she’s had, and I think she... (go to article)

Recently, I’ve seen several news articles about municipalities considering abandoning external identification tags for pet licensing and moving to a microchip-only program for pets in their communities. I find this approach worrisome at best, and potentially detrimental to the overall lost pet recovery of pets in their community. Why? Because it takes too many things going “right” for microchips to work. When pet microchip manufacturers talk about their product, they are optimistic to the point of arrogance. While confidence and hubris gets them sales, it is at the cost of animal safety and an increased expense to animal welfare organizations and individuals who replace a physical ID tag with a surgically implanted chip. I acknowledge that my credibility is suspect in pointing out the microchip short-comings because my company develops modern digital identification tags and software solutions. Anyone spending a modicum of time speaking with animal care professionals, however, will quickly learn the truth that microchip companies have oversold their solution as the panacea for pet identification. Before I go into the failings of microchips, I want to first point out that I am... (go to article)