Gaps in technology hinder pet ID system

Net Results: If you want a textbook example of how easily an information technology project can go wonky, you need look no further than your dog or your cat.

Imagine a company-wide IT scheme where almost no one understands a new technology and its capabilities or weaknesses; where every department makes different decisions on hardware and software; where no one is required to adhere to standards, and none of the departmental systems talk to each other. Substitute nations for departments, and you have the present system of pet microchipping.

While vets and welfare organisations say inserting a tiny silicon chip into your pet is one of the best things you can do to ensure a lost animal will be returned to you, the overall systems need consistency and structure, which is sorely lacking on the microchip front in Ireland.

Microchipping is perhaps the world's best known use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

This new area of technology has ignited controversy because people are not sure they want products they purchase sending back information about itself, and how it is being used, to the manufacturer or seller.

While companies are looking at RFID more for warehouse and shelf stock control, broader, and in privacy terms, more invasive uses are a distinct possibility. But because the technology is only emerging - meaning it is not yet accurate or reliable, and still costly for large-scale use - these bigger issues remain an issue for the future.

But RFID tags have been used for many years for tagging pets as a unique way of identifying a strayed animal and returning it to its owner.

A microchip is actually a tiny RFID array of chip and antenna, encased in a bio-compatible sheath (generally protein-coated glass that will not be rejected by body tissues). The size of a grain of rice, the chip is injected by a hollow needle into the loose skin between the animal's shoulderblades.

When a chipped animal is scanned with a handheld reader, the reader emits a radio signal at the chip's frequency, causing the chip to reflect back a radio signal that sends its data to the reader. After the chip inspects itself to verify that its information is uncorrupted, it sends a number which is then checked against the database and the owner's information is retrieved. Simple, eh? Well, not quite.

Europe uses International Standards Organisation (ISO) regulation chips, which use a frequency of 132.5 kHz - also known as FDX-B chips - while the US uses a 125 kHz chip, known as FDX-A.

Most scanners in the US read only FDX-A chips, although some are unable even to read all the 125kHz chips in the US market.

And in a move that has infuriated organisations such as the American Humane Society, and prompted US federal legislation, chips made by American Veterinary Identification Devices (AVID) are encrypted and, in the US, can't be read by non-AVID scanners unless other companies license the technology.

This causes some serious glitches in the international pet passport scheme set up between most European countries, including Ireland, and the US. Bring your chipped pet to the US (under the scheme, the animal must be chipped) and you'll find no one in the States can read or even find the chip.

Irish programmer Justin Mason, author of the open-source spam screening programme SpamAssassin, discovered this when he moved from Ireland to America and brought along his cat. None of the vets he took his cat to could find the animal's microchip. A bit of Googling later, Mason had stumbled on the issue of the incompatible chips and scanners.

To make sure customs agents could read his cat's chip to match him to his pet passport on return to Europe, Mason bought his own scanner at a cost of about €200.

"I didn't want to risk the cat being impounded for six months in quarantine at Heathrow," he says.

Nor do the headaches end there. A chip is only as dependable as the database to which it is linked. However, there are many databases which often don't share information. Additionally, a foreign chip offers no obvious information regarding its origin. The anxious owner must rely on officials at a pound or shelter being diligent and hunting down the nationality of the chip and the database it is linked to.

In frustration, European animal welfare groups and vets set up two online services, petmaxx.org and europetnet.com. Enter a chip number and these sites will search national databases to try to identify the pet's owner.

So why the mess? From Mason's perspective, it's a classic IT project gone awry: "Because it's at the leading edge of technology, no one really understands how to use this stuff."

Finbar Heslin, a vet in Kildare who has worked to try to streamline Irish microchipping standards, says part of the problem is that RFID chips have been developed for a different market. "The idea behind microchipping is excellent. The downside is that you're taking the technologies from the logistics industry and trying to apply them to animals."

Logistics is a huge market for RFID and so there is a greater incentive to adhere to standards.

"But with animals, the RFID market is small and there are no standards even across Europe," says Heslin.

In Britain and Ireland, the situation has been what he calls "a free for all" because distributors weren't licensed and cheap, non-ISO chips were sometimes brought in from abroad.

Another problem is the lack of uniformity in database provision, Heslin says. Different information goes into different databases. Some time-stamp information every time it is changed, some take only paper-based submissions and some need the registration data supplied.

Britain recently sorted some of these issues through an agreement between chip manufacturers, distributors and suppliers that ensures traceability and lets databases talk to each other. A similar move is needed here if microchips are to become the simple and reliable pet ID technology they should be.

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