Source: New York Times

Less than 2 percent of cats in animal shelters make it back to their owners, whereas about 15 to 19 percent of dogs are returned, and one reason is that more dogs wear collars.

Putting collars on some of the country’s 88 million cats may help change this situation, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

Most dog owners are required to register their dogs and obtain a pet license. This is not always a requirement for cats. Cat owners are also less likely than dog owners to use identifying collars.

There is fear that a collar could strangle a cat, or that cats will rip them off, said Linda Lord, a veterinary scientist at the Ohio State University and the study’s lead author.

To test these perceptions, Dr. Lord and her colleagues studied 538 collared cats for six months. At the end of the six months, 75 percent of the cats were still wearing their collars. Only a few had injured themselves, but none severely.

“The big message is that people really need to think about identifying their cats,” Dr. Lord said. “Cats will tolerate wearing a collar, and this could be a new paradigm shift in thinking.”

The researchers also found that embedding microchips that store identification information under the skin of the cat is effective. If a cat is lost, a scanner detects the chip and reads the owner’s information on it.