From  http://www.animalsamaritans.org/clinic.htm

MICROCHIPPING

Animal Samaritans Clinic is providing Microchipping for your companion animals. This relatively simple procedure has been proven to be of tremendous value in the painful event of a lost pet. The procedure is quick and painless. The tiny microchip has an identification number encoded into it and is coated with a bio-compatible material. The microchip is about the size of a grain of rice and fits inside a hypodermic needle which is used to inject it under the skin of your animal. No anesthesia or sedation is required.

Each chip is encoded with a unique number that can be read by universal scanners everywhere. All of the Animal Control and Animal Welfare Organizations here in the Coachella Valley have scanners available to them. If your pet is scanned and a microchip is found, the facility will call one or several of the pet recovery database services and you will be contacted by phone.

Currently we sell Avid microchips, so we recommend their registry database (Global PetTrac Database) at the time of adoption or implantation of the chip. Other registry services are not as able to track where the microchip was sold originally. At the time we implant the microchip it is registered to Animal Samaritans. Unless you register with a national service, Animal Samaritans will be contacted to provide the "Owner Information."

The Avid database registry and additional information on microchipping can be found on their Website:

http://www.avidid.com/index.html

REMEMBER!!
The Microchip is only as good as the information available in the database! You must keep your address and phone information up to date. If you decide not to register with a national database then you must keep your information current with Animal Samaritans. When your pet is lost and you are not registered with Avid PetTrac they contact Animal Samaritans and we have to be able to provide current information to locate the owner.