I think I can safely say yes, but I don't work in shelters, so I don't know how they operate. That is absolutely what they should be doing. Every animal that is picked up should be scanned when it gets back to the shelter and, if so, it's not all that difficult to find your information, as I just mentioned, and to reunite that cat with their owner.

Unfortunately, no. To know a location, we would have to have some sort of a GPS device or signal. This is different—microchips use what's called R-F-I-D, Radio Frequency Identification. What this means is that when the chip is scanned, it sends a very quick signal to the reader, and it is just a unique number— usually a 16 or so digit number. And if you’ve taken the time to register that microchip and you linked your contact information to it, then you will have your cat returned to you. Any time that number is scanned, it will allow us as veterinarians or employees at animal control to pull up your information, so that we can call you and say, "Hey, we have Fluffy at our clinic," and that's how you're reunited. Unfortunately, it’s not a GPS though.

The simple answer to that one is that it can help reunite you with your cat. If your cat ever becomes lost, microchipping is one of the most dependable ways to identify who the cat is and who it belongs to, and reunite the owner with the cat.

The risks are pretty significant because if heartworm disease is left untreated and essentially unprevented, it's probably not going to end well for that dog. It may not be next week or next month, but at some point, that disease will rear its ugly head, and usually by the time it does, it’s not good. They basically die of heart failure.

That's a tricky question to answer. I guess you could look at it in three ways. So number one, heartworm prevention is extremely imperative. I recommend it to everybody. Very seldom do I see complications with just preventatives. And that kills the infective stage of the heartworm that the mosquito tries to give the dog. So the risk isn’t zero but it’s close. If an animal's positive for heartworms, that means they have adult worms there. And if we go through with that treatment, there's risk associated with that because you are killing these worms that live, again, in the right side of the heart. And as mentioned, they're pretty long (six to eight inches) so killing them is half the battle, but they're still there. So now the body and immune system have to break down that dead worm and dispose of it, for lack of a better word. Well, what happens if they don't do it properly? What happens when that dog's too active after treatment? Then that dead or dying worm, or even partly disintegrated worm, can still migrate and go to the lungs and cause problems there. And the drug itself, while I seldom see reactions or problems to it, it's a pretty harsh chemical. It's got to kill a bunch of big, active heartworms. Any time you put a chemical in the body of a living creature, things can happen that you don't want to happen or don't expect to happen. Do I see it commonly? No, I do not. But they can have pain at the injection site, soreness, and I’ve seen some dogs that are wobbly on their backend. The third and final portion of this long answer is that sometimes when dogs have adult heartworms, those adults will reproduce and cause microfilaria, or baby heartworms. That takes a different modality to treat it. Some preventatives treat that nowadays, but oftentimes we'll use a high dose of ivermectin or something to kill that. Can you have side effects from that? Yeah. It's a high dose of ivermectin. Ivermectin is commonly used as a dewormer or heartworm preventative, but not usually at these levels. You can have dogs that might have a sensitivity to ivermectin, which can cause neurologic signs. You wouldn't want to give that to a Collie breed type of dogs, so Border Collies, Collies, Australian Shepherds, or any of those kinds of herding breeds. You’ve got to be careful when giving high doses of ivermectin. So all these complications are very rare, but they can happen.