Jerry’s Saga 

Why You Should Get Your Pet Microchipped    

This is our cat Jerry.  We moved to Springfield from New Jersey in September.  We had Jerry since he was a kitten and he was mostly an outside cat.  When we moved, I thought he might get lost, so I had him microchipped.  It was a totally painless procedure, just an insertion of a rice-size chip in the scruff of his neck.   After we moved, we kept him inside for two weeks, but he wanted to go out!  So we took him out on supervised visits to our yard for a few days.  The first night we let him out to roam, he did not come back.  That was back in late September.  We reported him lost to Home Again, put up posters in our neighborhood and searched for him for 2 weeks, but did not find him.  In mid-March, while on vacation in Georgia, we got a phone call from Dr. Berkshire that a client had brought him in to Crosspointe Animal Hospital.  She knew who to call because Jerry’s microchip gave her our contact information.   We can’t believe that Jerry made it through this terrible winter, with 55 inches of snow, on his own.  We are very thankful for the Crosspointe client who started to feed him a few weeks ago, and eventually was able to get him to trust her enough to allow her to bring him to the vet. Almost all vets and animal shelters now have microchip scanners.  If Jerry had not been chipped, we would not have been notified that he was alive and well, and just a few miles from home.                     

-Gay & Ken B.