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Originally Posted by chachi  Also what about the cancer risks with the microchip. I had mine microchipped and now wish I wouldnt have because of the dogs getting cancer around the microchip site. It seems owners would want the choice to do this but I thought I read a post that said AKC is requiring it. Is that the case? |
Of all the dogs microchipped there is only two that has been shown to have cancer around the injection site, and this is among 4 million dogs. Not only that, there's no way of knowing if the microchip did it, or the dogs would have gotten cancer at any injection site. Microchipping is this is thought to be one of the safest procedures there is. Thousands of dogs are returned to their owners each year, and in my opinion the benefits clearly out weigh the risks.
When commercial breeders learned they would have to use microchips instead of tattooing they put out a rush of propaganda insisting that microchips were unsafe. Thet showed studies of rats getting cancer from microchips, but didn't bother to mention these studies were done to study cancer. Scientists used special tumor producing rats, and KNEW that cancer would result, but they wanted to study exactly how it started and markers for it. You cannot take this study, and imply that microchips cause cancer in rats, and especially that microchips cause cancer in dogs. However, that’s exactly what they did. Commercial breeders do not want dogs linked back to them, under the old system of tattooing their were no records in which authorities could see which breeder produced which dogs. If a bunch of dogs were found out in some field shot to death, authorities had no way of knowing which miller euthanized in this way.
I don't think many small breeders are microchipping their pets, only their breeding stock.