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The City of Toronto’s “Chip Truck” will be showing up at a dog park near you, like it did on Sunday at the Dog Lovers’ Market in Riverside for registered pets to get microchips and rabies vaccines. The chip truck was parked at Joel Weeks Park, and other vendor booths were hosted in Riverside Common park featuring booths from local businesses selling dog clothes, treats, and a pet photo booth.
“It’s a really valuable service that we provide, because we offer rabies vaccines and microchips for $10 which is a lot less than you would pay at a veterinarian,” said manager of partnerships for Toronto Animal Services, Elana Trainoff.
Microchips contain information about the pet and owner like address and emergency contacts. The chips play an important role in returning a lost pet to their home.
“They can go into any veterinary clinic and they can be scanned, or with the Humane Society or Animal Services. Anywhere that has a microchip scanner will be able to identify your dog and be able to contact the owner,” said Trainoff.
Chief veterinary officer of Toronto humane society, Karen Ward, said that microchips are small radio frequency devices about the size of a grain of rice that get implanted just under the skin in between the shoulder blades of the animal. These devices are not painful for the animal to have, and have no negative side effects.
Ward said affordable vet care can be difficult to access in Toronto, with people often facing language, culture and cost barriers. The traveling chip truck can ensure a more affordable and accessible way for people to get the services they need for their pets.
Toronto Humane Society works with Toronto Community Housing, social services, and occasionally Toronto Police Services to do pop-up clinics for targeted populations.
“We’ve gone into homeless encampments, we’ve gone into public housing, people who are at risk of being homeless, and we offer vaccines and microchips and just sort of those basic preventative health care things. That’s actually currently a funded program, so for those folks, we offer that at no charge,” said Ward.
Trainoff was excited to have the truck at the event and interact with the community. “We often do our chip trucks like just kind of on our own. So it’s really nice to also be part of a fun event that just celebrates dogs and this neighborhood Riverside.”
The truck was scheduled to see over 90 pets on Sunday, and took as many walk-ins as they could.
The market was put on by Riverside Business Improvement Area (BIA) as one of many community building events they do throughout the year.
Executive director of Riverside BIA, Jennifer Lay, said “it’s a free public event, so we’re trying to have a mix of free, complimentary stuff, like meeting and greeting with rescue organizations and treats, and then services like the microchip.”
The Chip Truck visits a neighborhood in the GTA about once every month. Information on the next truck location is posted every few weeks on the City of Toronto website.
Sierra is a Toronto-based reporter for On The Record.
