HomeAgain® Emphasizes the Importance of Microchipping Pets

Microchip ID’s Help to Ensure Lost Pets Return Home

MADISON, N.J., June 1, 2021 – HomeAgain®, a leading pet recovery database part of Merck Animal Health, wants to call attention to the important role of microchipping and registering pets as part of National Microchip Month.

            “Microchipping a pet and registering the pet owners’ contact information with a national database, such as HomeAgain, provides the best chance of a pet being reunited with its family,” said Kenneth Klaus, general manager, HomeAgain. “Sometimes pets find a way to escape our homes. A microchipped pet registered with HomeAgain stands a much greater chance of being quickly reunited with its family. It’s a safe and simple procedure that helps pet owners have peace of mind should their pet get lost.”

HomeAgain developed these facts to emphasize the importance of microchipping pets: 

  • A microchip is a device about the size of a grain of rice that sits beneath a pet’s skin between the shoulder blades. Each microchip is programmed with a permanent identification number that is unique to the pet, which makes it vital that pet owners keep their pet’s microchip information up to date with current contact information.
    • Pets can be microchipped at any time, either at a veterinarian’s office during the time of vaccination, spaying or neutering, or at a local animal shelter. If a pet is adopted from a shelter, they frequently will have been microchipped and pet owners will be given information that shows the microchip number.
    • Pet recovery services such as HomeAgain offer a wide range of microchip readers for veterinary professionals and local shelters to quickly identify pets they come in contact with. The Universal WorldScan® Reader+ works on every type of microchip, making it simple to scan pets during routine wellness visits while initiating conversation around the importance of microchipping and registering pets with a reliable pet recovery database.  

“It’s important that pet owners understand the importance of having their dog or cat microchipped and registered with a reliable database, because the distress of dealing with a lost pet is the most common reason why the human-animal bond is broken,” said Joseph Hahn, DVM, executive director of U.S. Companion Animal and Equine Professional Services, Merck Animal Health. “We are proud to have the most robust active pet recovery service to reunite lost pets. As veterinary professionals, we highly recommend having pets protected with up-to-date microchip technology in order to ensure they are easily identifiable, and the pet owner is secure in the unfortunate case they go missing.”

When a pet is lost, owners notify HomeAgain either through the website www.HomeAgain.com or the staffed 24/7, 365-day U.S.-based Lost Pet Recovery call center (1-888-HOMEAGAIN). For premium members, HomeAgain will send out Lost Pet Alerts to participating animal shelters, veterinary clinics and HomeAgain PetRescuers in the area of where the pet was last seen. Once a found pet is scanned by one of the 50,000+ scanners at veterinary clinics and shelters throughout the U.S., HomeAgain then locates the pet owner through the contact information linked to the microchip number. HomeAgain has been successfully reuniting pets with their families for over 20 years and has celebrated nearly 3 million happy reunions.

For more information, visit www.homeagain.com or connect with us on Facebook Twitter, or Instagram.

About Merck Animal Health

For 130 years, Merck, a leading global biopharmaceutical company, has been inventing for life, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases. Merck Animal Health, a division of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA, is the global animal health business unit of Merck. Through its commitment to The Science of Healthier Animals®, Merck Animal Health offers veterinarians, farmers, pet owners and governments one of the widest ranges of veterinary pharmaceuticals, vaccines and health management solutions and services as well as an extensive suite of digitally connected identification, traceability and monitoring products. Merck Animal Health is dedicated to preserving and improving the health, well-being and performance of animals and the people who care for them. It invests extensively in dynamic and comprehensive R&D resources and a modern, global supply chain. Merck Animal Health is present in more than 50 countries, while its products are available in some 150 markets. For more information, visit www.merck-animal-health.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at @MerckAH.

Forward-Looking Statement of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA

This news release of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, N.J., USA (the “company”) includes “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of the company’s management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. There can be no guarantees with respect to pipeline products that the products will receive the necessary regulatory approvals or that they will prove to be commercially successful. If underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or risks or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

Risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to, general industry conditions and competition; general economic factors, including interest rate and currency exchange rate fluctuations; the impact of the global outbreak of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19); the impact of pharmaceutical industry regulation and health care legislation in the United States and internationally; global trends toward health care cost containment; technological advances, new products and patents attained by competitors; challenges inherent in new product development, including obtaining regulatory approval; the company’s ability to accurately predict future market conditions; manufacturing difficulties or delays; financial instability of international economies and sovereign risk; dependence on the effectiveness of the company’s patents and other protections for innovative products; and the exposure to litigation, including patent litigation, and/or regulatory actions.

The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additional factors that could cause results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the company’s 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K and the company’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) available at the SEC’s Internet site (www.sec.gov).