Quietly and without press attention, in the past 10 years most governments of the world have started requiring that dogs be microchipped. The chip contains information on vaccine records and health generally, along with owner information including phone number. Most people have complied and there is no organized movement against it. It has become a common practice over, and enforcement is constantly tightening.
In July of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) implemented a new rule that all dogs entering the United States had to be microchipped, even if you are traveling and you are a U.S. citizen. There was a great deal of blowback on that idea, especially from Canada. The CDC then tweaked its rule to exempt people traveling in the past six months from “low-risk” nations, among which there are only a few. In effect, the rule applies in most cases, and the upshot is the same: all dogs are going to be microchipped whether the owner wants it or not.
Of course, the idea is to intensify this over time as the opposition weakens, compliance increases and the notion of computer chips under the skin of all pets becomes normalized. You have heard of transhumanism, which is the integration of humans with machines into a single organism? This is transanimalism, and the chipping of the pets is a major step in that direction.
After all, there is nothing in particular about the chip that offers something unique that a tag doesn’t. The purpose is not to enable finding your pet should it run away. The chip has no GPS tracker in it. If you want that, there are very easy ways to get that with an Airtag or some other tracking device. The chip only aids in pet finding if the dog is taken to a vet, scanned, and the owner’s phone number appears. It seems far easier just to put a tag on the dog for that result.
They say that a tag can be changed. So can a chip. It’s more trouble but at least a tag has the advantage of being more humane and safe. There are instances of poisoning from dog chipping, rare but they exist. There is nothing invasive about a simple dog tag but it doesn’t speak to the techno-utopianism of the practice of chipping housepets.
I was speaking with some serious experts on infectious disease and vaccination. They had never heard of this rule or even this practice. My strong impression is that most people have never heard of the practice, although new dog owners will face the pressure from many veterinarians, no question. Indeed, the pressure begins from the first visit. They push one vaccine after another only reluctantly clarifying that all but rabies are optional. Once the cycle starts, it doesn’t stop and the chip becomes the recommended option for keeping up to date.
In fact, all European Union countries have already implemented dog-chipping mandates. The UK does, too. I have no first-hand information so I’m guessing that enforcement and compliance is spotty but if you use the veterinarian, you will encounter direct pressure. The doctor will feign shock to discover that your pet is not already chipped and will strongly insist it gets one immediately. This also means that all new pets are going to be chipped.
The chip itself is the size of a grain of rice. It can get lost inside and it can also be expelled over time. It can also stop working. The technology, in other words, is not infallible and it’s still experimental but that does not stop the enthusiasts and the mandators.
The rationale traces to the new claim you will find in epidemiological and vaccinological circles. The notion is that “spillover” diseases are somehow increasing; that is, there is a growing propensity of diseases to move to humans from animals. I’ve yet to find any incontrovertible evidence of this claim but it is frequently made in the literature. In fact, when the great debate broke about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the partisans of the idea of natural origin were especially fired up to claim that COVID-19 was a case of exactly this.
The debate over avian influenza—the bird flu—in fact, is bound up with this claim of growing spillover. The people who want to use bird flu for another test run of the mRNA platform have high hopes of exactly this. That’s why the Department of Health and Human Services has issued a PREP Act notice for the bird flu, which triggers an Emergency Use Authorization and hence indemnification of a bird flu vaccine.
“The U.S. government has ordered 4.8 million doses of bird flu from the CSL Seqirus company, produced in dog kidney cells and using a dangerous squalene-containing adjuvant,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “The [American Medical Association] issued [Current Procedural Terminology] codes for this vaccine [in July], so doctors could be reimbursed for administering it. There have been a total of 11 cases of bird flu in the U.S. since 2022, all mild, most involving just conjunctivitis. None were shown to have been transmitted human-to-human.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
Jeffrey A.Tucker’s interview with David Leis on Leaders on the Frontier can be seen here.