Well, good question. We use HomeAgain microchips. These sterile syringes come in little packages. Inside the syringe is a sterile microchip. They also give you an identification card, like a social security card, that you can keep in your wallet. We keep some of the numbers in our records, and then they also have a tag if you want to put the microchipping information on that.

What we do is we open up this sterile microchip. It's just like a syringe, as if we’re vaccinating your cat for a distemper vaccine or a rabies vaccine. We always put it between the shoulder blades at the back of the neck. We pull the skin up just a little bit. We insert it right under there while they're wide awake, just like a vaccine. It's not a surgery. And then that number has been implanted in this cat.

To check on it, we have a scanner. We have two scanners. This is a big industrial-use scanner that we use all the time. We go over to the kitty. We know where everybody places them in the same area. We scan over that area, and then the microchip number comes up, and then we know that it has a unique number. We can call the company and find out who that belongs to.

We also have this. This is a personal use scanner that people can buy at home, and the beauty of it is when we microchip your cat these days, it also will tell their body temperature. Any cat that has been vaccinated with the new microchips will not only pick up their microchip number when we scan them, but it will also tell their body temperature. So people at home might have that to be able to monitor their cat's body temperature.

It's really going to depend on the vaccination, how long overdue they are for boosters, and the veterinarian's discretion. So I recommend talking to your specific veterinarian, if you are overdue, about whether or not to restart. The best thing to do would be to stay on schedule as best as possible. And if for any reason you anticipate you might miss an appointment and you want to talk about to the doctor before that about when you can come in and still not have to get boosters, please give us a call.