Slick Willie to be installed with microchip!
OODINVILLE, Wash. -- Willie ran away one day last summer. Distraught, Debbie and Jim Pittman tried everything to find him. They put up "lost dog" fliers on hundreds of telephone poles, and they checked with nearly every pound around Puget Sound. Nothing. "But we never gave up hope," said Mrs. Pittman. "We knew he had his microchip."
Then, out of the blue one recent day, 11 months after the black Labrador disappeared, a call came. "My heart leapt," said Mrs. Pittman. "I 911'ed Jim on his beeper right away. I told him, 'Honey, Willie's coming home."'
The Pittmans' dog had been found, and a scan by Hooterville, a local pet shelter, turned up the tiny microchip that had been implanted inside Willie when he was a puppy. Embedded in the chip was a 10-digit number linked to a national database with information about the dog, including the Pittmans' telephone number.
The microchip involved in Willie's high-tech, homeward-bound journey is not new gadgetry -- as far back as 10 years ago, the Marin Humane Society in Northern California became the first shelter in the country to implant the chips in all animals put up for adoption and since then, the technology has reunited more than 1,000 pets -- 820 dogs, 340 cats and one rabbit, to be exact -- with their owners there.
The chips, the size of a grain of rice, implanted painlessly and within seconds, could be used in humans, posing obvious invasion-of-privacy issues versus some very real benefits: no more baby mix-ups in the hospital, a powerful new tool to track down kidnapped children, runaway teen-agers, or even beatmeat dads.
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