For the past two weeks Angela Mah, 43, a human resources director, has searched high and low for the owners of a four- year-old shih tzu she calls Sweetie Girl. The dog was found, dirty and matted, wandering along the road divider of Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 and heading towards the highway, when Ms Mah's brother stopped and picked her up.
She has called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) and other organisations such as Action for Singapore Dogs and Pet-Call, a private pet database, and placed advertisements online and in ST Classified to no avail.
What makes this more than just a lost dog story is that Sweetie Girl has a microchip - a requirement for dogs here since 2007 - and so you would expect that checking databases of the organisations would result in a match.
However, the microchip was never registered with the owner's details - a problem faced by hundreds of lost dogs every year.
A microchip is a small tag which is injected into the animal. It has no embedded information or global positioning system (GPS) capabilities. It only carries a scannable number which is meaningless unless the microchip's number has been registered with the pet and owner's information in one of four databases here.
Action for Singapore Dogs president Ricky Yeo estimates that, in general, up to 80 per cent of lost dogs are never reunited with their owners. This is largely because the dogs were never microchipped or the owners did not register their dog's microchip, he says.
The procedure, which costs about $50 depending on the clinic, can only be done by a veterinarian. Most licensed pet stores, puppy farms, and licensed breeders have their puppies microchipped along with their first vaccinations before the dog is sold. The new owners are then encouraged to register the microchip.
The chip is used by the AVA to keep track of dogs in case of an outbreak of rabies but is also used as proof of ownership in case of pet loss or ownership dispute.
While the SPCA and Action for Singapore Dogs have microchip databases for the details of dogs they have rehomed, the two main databases for microchip registration are with the AVA, which includes microchip registration as part of its annual dog licence renewal, and Pet-Call, a privately run database which charges $15 for a lifetime membership to its microchip database.
Of the 59,000 dogs registered in the AVA database, about 70 per cent are microchipped. The remaining 30 per cent were likely registered for a licence before microchipping became a requirement five years ago.
While the AVA has a database only for dogs, Pet-Call allows any animal, including cats, rabbits and fish, to be included in its database as long as it is microchipped. Of the 15,400 animals in the Pet-Call database, the vast majority are dogs followed by cats, which make up about 10 per cent of the list.
Yet Mr Yeo estimates that about half of the dogs here are not microchipped, not licensed or do not have their microchips registered.
The reasons for this vary.
Some pet owners do not want to pay the annual licensing fee - $14 for a sterilised dog, $70 for a non-sterilised dog - although it is required by law.
Some may have a non-HDB approved dog they do not want to register for fear it will be taken away, even though licensing is for rabies prevention, not for tracking or HDB approval.
Others think that the microchip is a GPS tracking device so they do not need to register their details with a database.
Yet others, like Ms Charis Koh, 20, think their dog will never run away. However, she has had to learn the hard way. Her 21/2-year-old toy poodle, Boyan, ran out of her family's flat in Tampines on July 17 this year.
She only learnt that he was missing when she came home from her part-time job as a personal trainer hours later.
"I was very upset when my parents told me. I was crying so loudly that my neighbours called the police because they thought something was really wrong."
She called the AVA, SPCA and other dog welfare organisations. She put up flyers, placed notices on online forums, Facebook and sent e-mail with detailed information about Boyan to every veterinary clinic she could find.
On why she never registered Boyan's microchip, she says: "I thought the microchip was already a form of registration."
One step those like Ms Koh can take is to register their lost pet's details with Pet-Call if they know the microchip number. Though Pet-Call charges more, $65, to register a pet which is lost, once the details have been entered in the system, an e-mail with these and the owner's contact information is sent to all vet clinics, animal welfare organisations and the AVA, in case the animal is found.
This is how Ms Joslin Toh, 22, recovered Wish, her family's miniature schnauzer, four years ago. She registered Wish on Pet-Call after he was lost. A month later, she got a call saying her dog had been found when its new owners took him to the vet for a check-up and a scan revealed the microchip number.
"The new family did not want to give it up but because the dog was microchipped and the microchip was registered to me, I got the dog back," she says.