[Blarg]

Well, you know how phone tag goes, and spacey people leaving it up to somebody else to do something, and that something eventually getting forgotten. Also, people change their phone numbers, and move. I'd find the ability to look it up on the web quite handy.

Heck, a shelter could even use contact with a database as a sort of receipt and proof that they didn't kill an animal or start medical experiments on it without doing something traceable to try to find the owner. Anyone can claim to have made a call, but they might be harder to trace and verify than an entry in a database.

Microchip companies or shelters or medical research facilities might see it as losing something to give out information on found pets, but they could also see it as a free service that helps them prove their value to the customer and their being above-board in their dealings with dog sellers. Really anyone who deals with lost or sold animals could use it and probably find some value in it.

Tattooes, collar tags, whatever, same deal. Just have different fields in the database to put that info into.

The thing is, you don't need info from all tagged pets, just the lost one. So the data entry wouldn't be a gigantic hump to get over on start-up. You don't have to care about the pets that have never been lost, only the ones that have, and that's a tiny minority. A shelter would just have to fill out a few fields in a database form, and it's done. Heck, I'm sure there are programs out there that could take that info and send out e-mails and/or make phone calls automatically.