What the Chip Actually Contains
A pet microchip stores exactly one thing: a 15-digit ISO 11784/11785-compliant number. No GPS coordinates, no medical history, no owner name, no photograph. The chip is a passive RFID transponder with no battery. It transmits that number only when a reader held within a few centimetres induces a radio frequency that powers it for a fraction of a second. The number itself is meaningless without a database that maps it to an owner. That distinction matters enormously, because most of the public conversation around microchipping conflates the chip with the record, and they are entirely separate things.
