How does a microchip differ from a QR tag?
A microchip and a QR tag are not the same thing, though both identify your animal. A chip is a grain the size of a rice kernel slipped under the skin, usually between the shoulder blades, and it stores a number pointing to an official register. A QR and NFC tag hangs visibly on the collar and leads to your pet's profile, which you run and edit yourself.
The mix-up I hear most often is: “My dog's chipped, so why would he need a tag as well?” It's a bit like saying that because you carry an ID card, you've no use for a business card. Yes, both identify you, but each works in a different way and in a different situation.
Who reads the chip, and who reads the QR tag?
A chip can only be read by someone with a special scanner: a vet, a shelter, an animal warden. The ordinary passer-by won't peer under your dog's skin, so first someone has to catch him and take him somewhere that owns a scanner. A QR tag, by contrast, gets scanned on the spot by anyone with a phone, and moments later they're ringing you.
That means very nearly everyone can help: your neighbour, the postie, the kid from the yard. They travel nowhere and track down no one. They hold up a phone and call. That can shrink your pet's journey home from hours to minutes.
There's one more catch with the chip. The details behind the number often go stale. People change phones and move house, and hardly anyone remembers to update the register. A tag you fix yourself in a minute, the moment anything changes.
Is it worth having both a chip and a tag?
Yes, because they kick in at different moments of the same event and complement each other. The chip is permanent and formal, required by law in many countries, and no one can take it off your dog or lose it. The QR tag plays first fiddle in those first, crucial minutes, when a finder rings you right away.
Think of it like seatbelts and airbags in a car. No sane person tells you to pick one over the other. The chip is your official record in the background, for the day the collar goes missing; the tag is the quick contact there and then, on the pavement.
A tag doesn't replace the chip, it fills the gap the chip leaves: the chip works where there's a scanner, the tag works anywhere there's a phone. Keep both and you're covered at every stage.