AVID Microchip and documentation

Hello

I'm a newbie and have been pouring over all the information about moving pets to England all weekend. Although it's not certain we're moving (we learned only on Friday it's possible for job relo), I want to get the ball rolling on the blood test in case we do. Here are my questions.

1. My dogs have the 9-digit AVID microchip. According to the great info posted on this forum, this should be okay as long as we're entering Heathrow. The documentation I have to support when my dogs received this is the AVID microchip certificate which has the barcode number and the date as well as the vet who originally did the chipping. Will this and my current vet's filling out of the form (Third Country Certificate form 998) be enough to show proof of when the chip was inserted?

2. Should I just get my dogs rechipped and re-vaccinated just to make this easier? They both are up to date, one dog is 7 months into a 3 year and the other is about 1.5 years into his 3 year. I'm sure they're titers will be fine as they've been well vaccinated their entire lives (10 and 8 years).

3. My vet doesn't normally put chip numbers on the rabies cert, is this necessary?

Any help would be great. This board is terrific. I'm learning soooo much.

Thanks.

Sorry, can't answer your questions, but thought I'd share my experience.

We moved our 11 yr old pup dog over to England last year when we relocated.  After trying for a while to work out the details of the process and documentation I decided it would be better to enlist the aid of a pet relocation service to help.  We settled on Air Animal and it was a great decision for us.  I'm sure there are other services who are equally capable but Air Animal impressed us with their professionalism, track record and empathy for us and our pup. 

I felt that the expense of their service was justified by the peace of mind we got from knowing that all vaccinations, blood tests and forms would be done correctly and on schedule.  Your mileage may vary.  Our experience turned out to be fantastic, the move was easy and fairly stress-free. 

Thanks for sharing. I ended up just starting over. They were rechipped and vaccinated. I figure this way there's no doubt we did it right.

For #3, I tried to get the chip # on all documents, just so that there was no confusion about what documentation belonged to what pet.

As for re-chipping, you may want to note on their paperwork that they have 2 chips now. If DEFRA finds the original chip and don't keep scanning, they could assume that the documentation doesn't match the pet and put them in quarantine.