When a person or child looses a pet dog, the grief and agony that the child faces is not comparable.
Depression and tears will dominates, yet a glimmer of hope will be sustained as the child goes around the area putting up notices to telephone poles and lamp posts asking for any information on the whereabouts of the dog.
Through the years, many methods have been devised to trace lost dogs and bring them back to their devastated owners.
Some methods that the local governments tried included tag laws and dog licensing, but they haven't really worked that well.
In the case that a lost dog loses its identification tag, it is totally impossible to locate the owner of the dog.
Another idea that several owners applied for quite a few years is the application of a tattoo to give their dog a permanent mark of identification.
The tattoo is normally applied on the inner thigh of the dog, near its abdomen and it contains a unique number which is assigned by the American kennel Club.
These tattoos are not normally visible and mostly shelter employees rarely check for any tattoos on the "stray" dogs that are brought to them regularly.
Recently a new method has been developed to help retrieve lost dogs.
This method harnesses the latest available in technology to put a stop to the rise in the number of grieving owners.
Here a microchip is placed under the skin of the dog near its shoulder.
This chip contains information on the dog and its owner in encoded format.
The data is read by a scanner.
This is a much more permanent method rather than a metal tag.
It is also less painful and also less inconvenient to the dog in comparison to tattooing.
This method also has a much higher success rate when compared to any other method in terms of retrieving lost dogs and reuniting them to their owners.
This method however is not totally perfect either.
The microchip may by some chance move over a time period and hence become unreadable.
The scanners may not be able to detect the chip and there is also a remote possibility that the chip could become demagnetized.
Yet this method is the most reliable yet and hence is the most widely used method the world over.
Inserting the microchip into the dog is a very simple and a painless process.
Unlike processes like tattooing which require the dog to be held down and even shaved, implanting the microchip is just an injection process.
All it takes is a tiny pinprick and the dog has a chip in it.
Any scanning device will now be able to read the data which is unique to each dog and its owner and its reliability makes the dogs retrieval most probably instead of a rare chance.
Thanks to the microchip technology, the days of children crying over their last dogs may soon be gone forever.