Who manufactures and sells the pet implants?
Wikipedia provides a fairly good overview of the complex—and often contentious—market for animal implants. The two companies which dominate the U.S. market — AVID and HomeAgain® — both sell microchips which are optimized to operate at a frequency of 125 kHz. This allows the scanner of each to detect the presence of the other’s microchip, even if it cannot actually decode the chip’s encoded or encrypted ID. Some scanners manufactured by Digital Angel/Destron Corp. and distributed by HomeAgain® for shelter use have for some time been able to both detect and decrypt the AVID ‘encrypted’ ID chip. Digital Angel/Destron Corp. seems to have been the first, after AVID itself, to join the group of manufacturers who have the secrets needed to recover the registration codes from these chips. Still, some of the Digital Angel/Destron models, (often those used by vets rather than shelters) may only flash an acknowledgment that an AVID chip has been found, with no number given. AVID’s base scanner
