Ms Sarah Lynch:

I thank the Senator for his question. It is very "Tomorrow's World" thinking. I really like it. Mr. Dowling can correct me if I am wrong and the ISPCA knows something that I do not, but I am not aware of any technology that exists like that. To explain a microchip, it is described in legislation and has to conform to certain standards. A microchip is around the size of a grain of rice. It is that small. It is put in the back of a dog in between the shoulder blades or around the neck area just under the skin. It is not possible to see, from glancing at the dog, that it is microchipped. A scanner is required. Luckily, one scanner works on all four microchips, so that is one less problem we have to deal with. It is brilliant.

Again, it is really about what is recorded against the chip. The chip is useless unless there is anything good recorded against it. What we have found is that the microchipping itself is not as much of a problem now as it was previously. We spoke earlier about awareness campaigns and how the public need to know what a dog should look like and the correct appearance of certain dogs. We are lucky in Ireland, with microchipping, because it has grown over a few years and there have been a lot of public awareness campaigns around microchipping, particularly with the its launch in 2016. It really goes to show the effectiveness of good public awareness campaigns. Referring back to what we discussed earlier, if we want to let people know what dogs really should look like, it is possible to run an effective public awareness campaign. Microchipping has proved that. We did research on behaviours and attitudes over the course of a number of years. From around 2016 to 2019, there was a significant increase in the uptake of microchipping and people being aware that they had to have their dogs microchipped. We are now seeing more dogs come in to our centre that are microchipped. Where it is all falling down is what is recorded against them, as the representatives of the ISPCA mentioned earlier. That is the really important aspect to it.

Of course, there is still an issue with ensuring that those who do not want to comply with the regulations become compliant. We are very lucky that we have such compliant dog owners, who comply with the legislation and who chip and register their dogs. In respect of those dogs that are not chipped, we have to figure out a way to make those non-compliant people compliant by chipping and registering their details. To go back to the original point, recent surveys that we have done up to 2019 show that there is more than a 90% uptake in microchipping dogs. It is about the correct data being registered against them. On the Senator's point about technology, I hope something like that is developed in the future, because it would help a lot.