Mandatory Chipping Bill HR2744. Here's a letter from Avid explaining a little about the mandatory chipping bill HR2744. I received this about 6 months ago.
Word to the wise; have your babies chipped now before the cost rises drastically. Should this bill ever go through, the cost of microchipping will rise drastically as it would become a requirement and no longer an option.
Subject: Mandatory Microchipping NOW?
Here's a clip from a post that's making the rounds this afternoon.
This was written by a person at AVID and I am in the process of
following it up with them right now -- stay tuned!
Bill HR2744 requires that all pets be microchipped and requires a very
particular frequency for the microchip. That frequency is 134.2 kHz.
However in the USA, we DO NOT use that frequency. We use the industry
standard of 125 kHz. So if this bill passes, not only would every
rescue, shelter, vet and disaster group have to start over, but the
system as we know it would fall apart. These foreign frequency chips
cannot be detected or read by 99% of the scanners in operation in the
US. It is quite simply not what we use here.
The HSUS is backing this bill, and they also want a centralized
database presumably kept by them? Banfield actually introduced the
chip and it was rejected in the marketplace by many states, including
yours. So the HSUS has taken it to Congress.
Unfortunately, HR 2744 is the appropriation bill for Agriculture,
Rural Development, and the Food and Drug Administration -- thousands
and thousands of lines. It's very likely that the requirement is in
there in such an obscure way that you'd have to read a large part of
it -- and even then, you might miss it, due to references to other
documents. Banfield and/or HSUS probably paid millions of dollars
per line to get it in there, you can bet they did it well.
Right now we need to know exactly what the bill says and where it
says it. More to come, feel free to post the details if YOU have
them. |