Cat microchipping is now mandatory from June 2024.

Pet microchipping – a brief background

If you didn’t already know, the PIT microchip (Passive Integrated Transponder) is a small device about the size of a grain of rice that is implanted under the skin and uses radio frequencies to broadcast the encoded data about said animal.
The technology has been around since the early 1980’s when it was first employed in marine research to track fish migrations and then later for animal conservation and wild animal behaviour analysis, being more effective than earlier ‘trap, mark and recapture’ techniques. I first heard of pet microchipping in the 1990’s when it became more commonplace for larger pets such as dogs, or expensive pedigree and show animals, but generally didn’t seem to take off much with domestic pets. It took quite a while for the infrastructure to be developed and was initially left to welfare groups and vets to manage amongst themselves, hence being quite expensive to have done and often requiring a payment subscription for managing the information.
Eventually, in the 90’s these separate entities came together to form the ‘Microchip Advisory Group’ an association to centrally manage and coordinate the data and by 2012 rebranded to the ‘Microchip Trade Association’: https://microchiptradeassociation.org

Fast forward to the 2000’s and microchipping in dogs was commonplace, but not a legal requirement. Given dogs’ tendencies to go on their travels, many people embraced them, and I can totally see why. Though within the cat community I still hadn’t heard of many people buying in to the idea of having their pet chipped.
As mentioned previously, I was one of such people never considering the need for a microchip, and when Munch landed in my lap it was purely by necessity that she was chipped as part of the registration and search process put in place by the Cats Protection League as part of their service whilst trying to find her previous owners. In doing so I came to realise a few of the underlying benefits of cat microchipping, but I’ll mention those later.
By 2016 Microchipping of all dogs became law (if a dog is found to be older than 8 weeks old and unchipped or unregistered on an approved database the owner can be fined up to £500) but I think it is well known these days and I can’t think of any dog owners I know that don’t have their animal chipped.