What to Put on a Pet ID Tag for a Disaster: What Fits and What Matters Most

Engrave three things: the pet’s call name, the mobile number you actually answer, and a second number that belongs to someone outside the affected area who has agreed to be listed. Leave the home address off. Add a medical word only if going a day or two without treatment would put the animal in danger. That is EmergencyPetPrep’s default, and it is our own reasoning, not a published standard. The ASPCA, Humane World for Animals and American Humane each recommend a different set of fields.

You have a few dozen characters of metal, several organizations recommending different fields, other tags already competing for space on the collar, and no way to edit the tag once it is engraved. So this page is a character budget. Every line you add costs a line you cannot have, and a stranger will read the finished tag out loud in a parking lot.

If you want the hardware decision rather than the wording, the QR code tag versus microchip comparison covers which technologies to layer. This page assumes you have decided to put an engraved tag on the collar and are looking at the empty text fields on the order form.

Four organizations, three different tags

No consensus tag exists. Three organizations publish materially different answers, and the AVMA declines to list fields at all. Blending them into “experts recommend” would misstate all of them. Here is what each says, as of September 29, 2026.

The ASPCA puts three things on the tag. Its disaster preparedness page says: “Your pet’s ID tag should contain his name, telephone number and any urgent medical needs.” The next sentence moves your name and contact information to the pet’s carrier. The word “address” does not appear in that page’s guidance.

Humane World for Animals (formerly the Humane Society of the United States) names one field. Its pet emergency plan page says cats and dogs should be microchipped and wearing collars with up-to-date tags, “including your cell phone number.” It also says the average person who finds your pet “won’t be able to scan for a chip, but they will probably be able to read a basic tag”. The same page says the collar and identification should be up to date and visible at all times.

American Humane publishes the longest list, and it is the one that most directly contradicts this page’s advice. Its identification page says all cats and dogs need collars with ID tags, rabies vaccination tags and city or county licenses where applicable, and: “The ID tag should include the owner’s name, address, telephone numbers (day and evening) and the pet’s name.” Its pet disaster preparedness page repeats the address in a disaster setting, recommending a microchip or a collar tag with your name, address and cell phone number.

The AVMA does not list tag fields. Its microchipping FAQ answers the question owners get wrong. Asked whether a microchip replaces identification tags and rabies tags, it says: “Absolutely not. Microchips are great for permanent, tamperproof identification, but nothing replaces a collar with up-to-date identification tags.” It explains that a person who finds an animal wearing tags can contact the owner directly if the information is accurate, while a chip may be the only route left if the collar or tags are gone.

Source (as of September 29, 2026)	Pet’s name	Owner’s name	Phone	Address	Medical	Other tags named
ASPCA, Disaster Preparedness	Yes, on the tag	Not on the tag; on the carrier	Telephone number, singular	Not named in its guidance	Any urgent medical needs	Not named on this page
Humane World for Animals	Not named	Not named	Cell phone number	Not mentioned on the page	Not named	Not named
American Humane, Identification Tags & Microchips	Yes	Yes	Telephone numbers (day and evening)	Yes, explicitly	Not named	Rabies vaccination tags and city or county licenses
AVMA, Microchipping FAQ	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Rabies tag, to be attached to the collar

Four sources, three tags. Someone has to make the trade-offs, and since the tag goes on your animal, that is you.

The space you are working with

Organizations write as if space were free. It is not, and manufacturers publish how much of it you get. These figures are from their product pages and order forms as of September 29, 2026. Manufacturers can change line counts and character limits without notice, and the limit that governs you is the one the order form enforces on the day you order.

Made by Cleo says its engraved tag fits up to four lines (best results with one to three) and: “Allows 14 characters per line max (count includes spaces).” Its hanging styles engrave both sides at no extra charge, and the order form offers four lines per side, so the stated maximum is eight lines and 112 characters, or 84 characters at the three lines per side it recommends. Its slide styles are single-sided. The page adds that less text gives better results, because text is auto-sized by character density, number of lines and total width.

GoTags states line counts in its product copy and enforces character limits in its order form. Its stainless slide-on tag is described as engraved with up to four lines and fits collars from 3/8 to 1 inch wide. The order form caps the first line at 18 characters and each of the next three at 22. Its round stainless tag with a paw cutout is described as double-sided with up to six lines, in a 1.3 inch regular size and a 1 inch small size. Its form allows 15 characters on each of three lines per side.

Boomerang Tags, which sells slide-on tags under the CollarTags name, publishes line counts rather than character counts. It offers five lines on the 5/8, 3/4 and 1 inch wide sizes, and its miniature size is limited to four. The size you need depends on your collar’s width. It engraves in upper case, and it does not engrave the back of a CollarTag because the back sits against the collar. For a slide-on tag, you have one side.

The totals below are EmergencyPetPrep’s arithmetic from those published figures.

Tag (specs as of September 29, 2026)	Lines	Characters per line	Total characters
Made by Cleo hanging tag, both sides, stated maximum	8 across two sides	14 including spaces	112, split 56 per side
Made by Cleo hanging tag, both sides, recommended 3 lines per side	6 across two sides	14 including spaces	84, split 42 per side
Made by Cleo slide tag, single-sided, stated maximum	4	14 including spaces	56, one side only
GoTags stainless slide-on, per its order form	4	18 on line 1, then 22	84, one side only
GoTags round with paw cutout, per its order form	6 across two sides	15	90, split 45 per side

Here is what fields cost, character by character. A US phone number written 555-555-5555 is twelve. Written (555) 555-5555 it is fourteen, and written bare as 5555555555 it is ten. MILO is four. MICROCHIPPED is twelve. NEEDS INSULIN is thirteen. A street address is expensive: 1428 MAPLE ST is thirteen, and it is nearly useless without a town, so 1428 MAPLE ST, ODESSA runs to twenty-one.

On one side of a Made by Cleo tag, used as its page recommends, you have three lines of fourteen characters, and a phone number with parentheses fills one of them exactly. That tag cannot hold a name, two phone numbers, a medical note and a street address. The hanging styles double the room to 112 characters, but an address with a town still takes about a fifth of it. On the double-sided round tag, with up to 90 characters, that twenty-one-character address line takes nearly a quarter of everything you have.

The real question is not what would be nice to have on the tag. It is which two or three things you are willing to spend the whole tag on.

The collar is already crowded

Count the hardware before you allocate characters. American Humane names three separate items that belong on the collar: ID tags, rabies vaccination tags, and city or county licenses where applicable. The AVMA says the rabies tag should be attached to the collar so others can quickly see that the pet has been vaccinated.

The engraved tag therefore shares a ring with a rabies tag and often a license tag, both issued to you rather than designed by you. Three consequences follow.

Weight and noise. Three hanging tags on a cat’s breakaway collar are a real weight and noise problem, which is part of why slide-on tags exist. Boomerang’s engraving page suggests installing two or more CollarTags on the same collar to fit more information. That works, but two slide-on tags still compete for the same strap.

Scanning interference. This point is EmergencyPetPrep’s own reasoning, not published guidance. Stacking more tags to solve the character budget adds metal to the collar. The AVMA’s microchipping FAQ lists what can interfere with scanning and chip detection: animals that will not stay still, long or matted hair near the chip site, excess fat deposits where the chip sits, and a metal collar or a collar with a lot of metal on it. If your animal ends up at a shelter or vet’s office, ask intake staff to remove the collar and run a complete-body scan with a universal scanner, and say so when you hand the animal over.

The rabies tag is a pointer, not an answer. The AVMA says rabies tag numbers may help identify a lost pet and its owner, but getting that information can be difficult if veterinary clinics, animal control or public health agencies are closed for the day. Microchip registries, it says, can generally be reached online or by telephone at any time. The rabies tag points to an office that the AVMA says may be closed for the day, and after a hurricane possibly for much longer (our inference). The engraved tag is the only thing on the collar a stranger can act on with no office open. That is what your few dozen characters are for.

The tag builder, line by line

These are EmergencyPetPrep’s defaults, with the reasoning attached to each line, because an order form is filled in alone and a caveat three paragraphs above a field does not travel with it.

The rule behind all of it is ours: an engraved tag is a publication, and its audience is whoever is holding your animal. The AVMA describes reputable microchip registries as having safeguards to protect your personal information from unauthorized access. A tag has none of that: no lookup, no login, and no record of who read it. Everything you engrave is handed to every person who will pick up that animal, and to everyone standing next to them. The comparison between a protected registry field and an unprotected engraved field is our own reasoning. Neither the AVMA nor any other cited source draws it.

Line 1: the pet’s name

Default: the call name, nothing else.

The ASPCA lists it first in its tag sentence, and American Humane lists it too. It is cheap in characters and it works: a stranger who can say the name has a better chance of getting a frightened dog to hold still.

Two things not to add. First, do not add your surname. Boomerang’s engraving page advises against it on formatting grounds, because it forces the pet-name line to be smaller and more crowded. Our separate reason is that a surname plus a phone number is enough to find a home address in about a minute, even though no single field looks like it discloses one. That combination point is ours, not published guidance. Second, do not use the line for a slogan. HAVE YOUR PEOPLE CALL MY PEOPLE is thirty-one characters, more than half of a single-sided Made by Cleo tag, and a stranger has to decode it before finding your number.

Line 2: the number you answer

Default: your mobile number, digits and hyphens only, no parentheses.

Humane World for Animals names this field specifically (“including your cell phone number”), and the ASPCA names a singular telephone number. Writing 555-555-5555 instead of (555) 555-5555 saves two characters at no cost to legibility, which on a fourteen-character line is most of a word.

Do not engrave a home landline. An evacuation means you are not in the house, so a number that rings there is a number nobody will answer. If you still have a landline, put it in the microchip registry record, not on the metal.

Line 3: the number somebody else answers

Default: a second number belonging to a person outside the affected area who agreed in advance to be listed.

No organization cited here publishes this as a tag field, so the justification is ours. The nearest published idea is American Humane’s travel advice to put a temporary tag on your pet with the contact information of someone who knows how to reach you. A person who knows how to reach you is a better answer than the phone in your pocket, because in an evacuation your phone is the thing most likely to fail. It is at four percent, or on silent in a motel two hundred miles away, or in the car. Extending that travel advice to evacuation is EmergencyPetPrep’s judgment. The microchip registration audit page covers the registry side of the same idea.

Ask that person first, and tell them what they are agreeing to. Their number is their data, and once engraved it is published to every stranger who handles your animal for the life of the tag. So the request is: “I am about to put your number on a metal tag on my dog’s collar, where anyone who finds him will read it, and I would like your permission.” Then give them what they need: the animal’s name and description, your vet’s name, and permission to say yes, that is their dog, and here is how to reach them.

Choose someone far enough away that the same event is not happening to them, and someone who answers calls from unknown numbers. An out-of-area contact who lets it ring is a decoration.

Line 4, if you have one

Default: leave it blank, or use it for a medical word if and only if missed treatment is dangerous.

The fourth line is where tags go wrong, because people fill it since it is there. Two candidates are covered below: an urgent medical need, which the ASPCA does recommend, and the word MICROCHIPPED, which none of the cited pages recommends. If you have nothing that meets the bar, leave it empty. Fewer lines mean larger text, according to Made by Cleo’s sizing note, and legibility at arm’s length in bad light is the whole function of the tag.

The address: what the sources say and what we conclude

This is the one field where EmergencyPetPrep takes a position against named organizations, so here are all three parts of the reasoning.

What the sources recommend. American Humane recommends the address in two documents, its identification page and its disaster page. GoTags’ product copy also invites buyers to include the address. The ASPCA’s tag guidance omits it. Humane World for Animals’ disaster page does not mention an address, but its lost-dog page says a lost pet has a better chance of being returned if it always wears a collar and an ID tag with your name, address and telephone number, and its lost-cat page publishes the same recommendation for cats.

What none of them addresses. None of the sources cited on this page weighs what an address on a tag discloses, names a scenario in which the reader is not benign, or says the address is safe. One manufacturer, CollarTags, suggests listing several phone numbers instead of an address, without giving a reason. Beyond that, the question is not reasoned about in the sources cited here.

What this site concludes. Leave the home address off the tag.

In an ordinary week, an address on a tag is a mild convenience and a mild exposure: a neighbor can walk the dog back to the door. During an evacuation, the same twenty-odd characters tell a stranger, when your neighborhood has emptied out and response times are measured in days, which house is unoccupied. You are not choosing between a helpful finder and a hostile one. You are publishing to both, permanently, on an object designed for anyone to read.

The cost is real. An address is the fastest route home for a loose dog found two streets away by someone who does not want to make a phone call. The second phone number on line 3 recovers most of that benefit, because it gives the finder a second person to reach rather than a second thing to do, without naming a building. If you disagree, you are agreeing with American Humane, which is a defensible place to stand. Make the decision on purpose.

Medical needs are a disclosure decision

The ASPCA recommends this field: “Your pet’s ID tag should contain his name, telephone number and any urgent medical needs.” Often that is right. But it is not free.

Whatever you engrave is read by whoever catches the animal. It is as non-private and non-recallable as every other line, and it is a line about your animal’s vulnerabilities. NEEDS INSULIN, BLIND, DEAF and SEIZURES are statements that a well-meaning person will act on and another person can also act on. That is a reason to fill the field deliberately, not to leave it blank.

EmergencyPetPrep’s bar, which is ours and not the ASPCA’s: engrave a medical line when a day or two without treatment would put the animal in real danger, and skip it otherwise. Which of your animal’s needs cannot wait a day or two is a question for your veterinarian, and the answer differs by animal. Ask before you order.

Keep the line to the shortest actionable form. NEEDS INSULIN is thirteen characters and tells a shelter worker what to escalate. DIABETIC is eight and does nearly the same job. Put the rest somewhere with more room: the condition, the drug names, the doses and the times of day belong on the card that travels with the crate. The crate and kennel emergency ID card page builds that document. The tag holds a word; do not ask it to do the card’s job.

One more thing not to do. Engraving something like NEEDS MEDS or SPAYED as a theft deterrent, on the theory that it makes the animal less appealing to keep, has no source behind it among the pages cited here. A false medical word on a tag is a lie engraved on a permanent object that a veterinarian may one day read.

The other job the tag does: rabies vaccination status

This part rarely appears in writing about pet tags. It comes from the document that governs rabies control in the United States rather than from an animal-welfare organization.

The National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians publishes the Compendium of Animal Rabies Prevention and Control. The 2016 edition (JAVMA Vol 248, No. 5, March 1, 2016, pages 505 to 517) is endorsed by the AVMA, the American Public Health Association, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and the National Animal Care and Control Association. Its masthead says it has not undergone peer review. A later edition may exist; your state or local health department has the current rules.

First, the sentence that scopes all of it: “These recommendations do not supersede state and local laws or requirements.” National guidance here is a framework. The operative rules are your state’s and county’s.

The Compendium’s adjunct procedures open with identification: “Dogs, cats, and ferrets should be identified (eg, metal or plastic tags or microchips) to allow for verification of rabies vaccination status.” In this document, the tag is not primarily a way to reach you. It is a way for someone else to establish what has been done to your animal.

Its disaster response section (Part I.B.8) says animals may be displaced and need emergency sheltering, and lists two measures that bear on your tag: ensure all animals have a unique identifier, and vaccinate all dogs, cats and ferrets unless reliable proof of current vaccination exists. In a disaster shelter, then, the default for an animal without reliable proof is vaccination. The document names the paper that serves as proof: Part II.F says agencies and veterinarians should use Form 51, the rabies vaccination certificate recommended by the association, or an equivalent, completed in full and signed by the administering or supervising veterinarian. That is the paper to have in the go bag.

The practical join is ours. A rabies tag number that cannot be looked up is not proof of anything by itself. The Compendium does not say how any particular shelter will judge a certificate, because its recommendations do not override state and local requirements. So treat the tag and the paperwork as one item: keep the rabies tag on the collar, and carry the vaccination certificate in the go bag where you can hand it to someone. If you must choose which to grab, take the certificate, which answers the question the tag only points at.

Bites and strays. The Compendium sorts animals into different tracks, and it is worth understanding in both directions.

• On strays, it says local health departments and animal control can enforce removal of strays more effectively if owned animals are required to have identification and be confined or kept on leash. It says strays should be impounded for at least 3 business days, to determine whether human exposure has occurred and to give owners time to reclaim them.
• On animals that expose a person, it says a healthy dog, cat or ferret should be confined and observed daily for 10 days from the exposure regardless of vaccination status. It says not to vaccinate the animal during that period, to avoid confusing rabies signs with rare vaccine reactions, and that any illness should be reported immediately to the local health department. It directs questions about possible exposures to state or local public health authorities.
• Separately, it says a stray or unwanted dog, cat or ferret that exposes a person may be euthanized immediately and its brain submitted for testing. That sentence is scoped to strays and unwanted animals. It is not a statement about owned, identified animals, and no one can tell you what any jurisdiction will do in a particular case, because local law governs.

If your animal has bitten someone, call your local health department. The Compendium directs questions about possible exposures to state or local public health authorities and says prompt recognition and reporting of possible exposures to medical and veterinary professionals and local public health authorities are critical. The page on a dog bite at an evacuation shelter covers that sequence.

The document’s own structure shows that “stray” and “owned” are different tracks with different consequences, and identification is what makes the distinction enforceable. EmergencyPetPrep’s conclusion from this: a legible tag is the fastest evidence an animal carries that it is somebody’s. Everything else that proves ownership lives in an office, a database or a filing cabinet, and after a disaster all three may be unreachable for days. If your animal is already in someone else’s custody, see proving a pet is yours and getting it back.

If you have a safety concern, read this before you order

Everything above assumes the worst realistic reader of your tag is a stranger with no interest in you. For some households that is wrong, and the calculation changes.

If you are dealing with domestic violence, stalking, a protective order, or any situation where a specific person must not find you, understand what these objects are. A tag, a crate card, a lost-pet flyer and a sticker on your front door are all publications, readable by whoever holds the object, with no authentication, no log and no way to take them back. A phone number on a tag is a phone number handed to anyone who catches your animal, and a pet’s tag can lead to you. The same goes for a veterinarian’s line, if you add one: a clinic has a public address, so naming it narrows where you live the way an address would. It comes off with the rest if a specific person must not find you.

EmergencyPetPrep will not improvise safety advice for that situation. It is specialist work, and mistakes have consequences we cannot see from here. The Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (techsafety.org) develops resources on the use of technology for agencies and survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and trafficking, including a survivor toolkit with safety tips and privacy strategies, and focuses on the intersection of technology and abuse. Its pages do not include pet ID tag guidance, and none is implied. It is listed here because deciding what is safe to publish about yourself is the work it does. Its site has a quick-exit control and a Get Help section.

Four worked tags at four budgets

The same household’s information fitted to four published limits, with character counts done line by line. MILO, KIM and every phone number here are made-up placeholders, not real animals, people or numbers. Use your own.

Budget A: three lines of fourteen characters, Made by Cleo’s recommendation. Total 42.

MILO
555-555-0142
555-555-0187

Four, twelve and twelve against a fourteen-character ceiling. Fourteen characters go unused, which buys larger text. No surname, no address, no medical note. This is the minimum viable disaster tag, and for most households it is enough.

Budget B: four lines, 18 then 22, the GoTags stainless slide-on form. Total 84, one side only.

MILO
555-555-0142
555-555-0187 KIM
NEEDS INSULIN

Four, twelve, sixteen and thirteen. The third line names the out-of-area contact by first name only, which costs four characters and saves a stranger from wondering who they are calling. The fourth line is the medical disclosure, included only as an example of a need your veterinarian might say cannot wait. If your animal has no such need, delete that line and take the legibility.

Budget C: six lines across two sides, the GoTags round tag with the paw cutout. Total 90, split 45 per side.

front:  MILO
        555-555-0142
        555-555-0187
back:   VET
        555-555-0163
        MICROCHIPPED

Four, twelve and twelve on the front against a 15-character ceiling on every line; three, twelve and twelve on the back. Fifty-five of ninety characters are used.

Look at what the ceiling does to the back. A hyphenated phone number is twelve characters, and a three-letter label plus a space makes sixteen, over the fifteen the form allows on any line. The label and the number cannot share a line, so VET sits alone on its own line. The limit does not just cut what you write; it dictates the shape.

The extra space did not go to an address or a second medical line. It went to a veterinarian’s number, an institution that can confirm the animal exists, rather than a person whose number you are publishing without asking. A vet line is not free: a clinic has a public address, and it comes off if a specific person must not find you. MICROCHIPPED is discussed below.

Budget D: a cat on a breakaway collar already carrying a rabies tag and a license. One slide-on tag, one side, three lines.

MILO
555-555-0142
INDOOR CAT

The third line does something specific. An indoor cat found outdoors got out, and a finder who knows the difference is less likely to assume it lives in the neighborhood and leave it. American Humane’s underlying point is that even cats that never go outside need tags, because one can slip through an open door. The INDOOR CAT engraving is ours.

The breakaway collar changes what the tag can carry. American Humane recommends a safety collar with a short piece of elastic so a cat can escape if caught on blinds, furniture or fencing. A collar built to release will sometimes release, and every character on the tag leaves with it. For a cat, the engraved tag is the fast layer and not the durable one, and the microchip is doing more of the work. The AVMA’s answer runs both ways: nothing replaces a collar with current tags, and a chip may be the only route if the collar is gone. Write the tag as if the collar will stay on, and register the chip as if it will not.

About the MICROCHIPPED line

None of the cited pages lists MICROCHIPPED as a tag field; it is our suggestion. Humane World for Animals says the average person who finds a pet can’t scan a chip but can probably read a basic tag, and a finder who reads that word knows a vet or shelter visit will produce an answer even if nobody answers the numbers. It is a twelve-character nudge from “keep it and hope someone claims it” toward “get it scanned.” It is worth its characters only if you have them spare, and worth nothing if the registration behind the chip is stale. The microchip registration audit is the higher-value hour of the two.

What not to engrave

• Your home address. Covered above. This is our position, and it disagrees with American Humane and with Humane World for Animals’ lost-dog and lost-cat pages.
• Your surname next to your first name and phone number. Any two of those three are enough to find a household. Boomerang’s formatting guidance also advises against a surname on the name line, for legibility.
• A landline that rings inside the house you evacuated. By definition nobody is there.
• “REWARD IF FOUND”. It costs fifteen characters, more than a whole line on a Made by Cleo tag. A finder does not need it in order to call you, and it changes the incentives of the person holding your animal in a way you cannot control from a hundred miles away. None of the cited pages names it as a tag field.
• A false medical or surgical claim as a theft deterrent. Discussed above.
• Anything you would not read out loud to a stranger. That is the whole test, and it applies to any field a form invites you to fill.

Your pet ID tag checklist

• Read the order form’s own limits before you write anything. The published line count and the enforced character count are two different numbers, and only one of them stops you.
• Line 1: the pet’s call name only. No surname, no slogan.
• Line 2: the mobile number you actually answer, written with hyphens rather than parentheses to save two characters.
• Line 3: a second number belonging to someone outside the affected area. Ask them first, tell them their number is going onto a metal tag that strangers will read, and brief them on the animal.
• Decide the medical line on the missed-day test. Engrave it if a day or two without treatment is dangerous, and understand that whoever catches the animal reads it.
• Leave the home address off, or put it on knowing that our reason for leaving it off is that during an evacuation it identifies an empty house, and knowing that American Humane recommends including it.
• Keep the rabies tag on the collar, and put the vaccination certificate in the go bag, because the tag points at an office that may be closed and the certificate is the document you can hand over.
• Read the finished text out loud to a stranger in your head before you submit the order. Anything you would not say to them does not belong on the tag.
• If a specific person must not be able to find you, do not improvise. Treat the wording as the publication it is, and start at the NNEDV Safety Net Project at techsafety.org.
• Re-engrave the day either number changes, including your out-of-area contact’s. Engraving is permanent, so a number they gave up two years ago is now a stranger’s phone. A tag with a disconnected number is the same failure as an unregistered microchip, and it is cheaper to fix.
• Register the microchip as if the collar will come off, because on a cat wearing a breakaway collar it is designed to.

Where to go next

This page is the engraved-tag spoke of the pet evacuation kits hub. It covers the words on the metal and the space you have for them.

• The hardware decision: the QR code tag versus microchip comparison covers which technologies to layer. The GPS tracker versus AirTag breakdown covers the live-location layer that neither a tag nor a chip provides.
• The record behind the number: the microchip registration audit and contact chain page audits the registry fields and builds the chain of people a shelter can call.
• Documents that hold more than a tag can: the crate and kennel emergency ID card, the printable pet emergency wallet card and the printable pet rescue alert sticker. The do firefighters know pets are inside page explains the limits of that sticker.
• If the animal is already gone: start with how to find a lost pet after a disaster, then filing a disaster lost-pet report for which agency holds the file.

Then do the one thing that takes ten minutes: read the tag currently on your animal’s collar, physically, in good light. An out-of-date number is the one failure a finder cannot work around.