Every Arrival Starts From Zero
A settled owner checks one chip once or twice a year. You inherit a new chip story every few months, and the stories vary more than new fosterers expect. One cat arrives with a chip correctly registered to the rescue and a monitored emergency number. The next arrives chipped to a previous owner who surrendered her months ago, or with a number recorded on paperwork that does not match the chip that scans. So build the check into arrival day itself, alongside the settling-in routine, and treat the rescue's paperwork as something to verify rather than file away unread.
Verify the Number, the Registration and the Hours
First, have the chip scanned, ideally at the rescue before collection or at your vet within the first days, and compare the number read against the number on the paperwork digit by digit. Second, ask the rescue the questions that decide whether the chip works in practice: whose phone does a scan reach, is that number answered in the evening and at weekends when most escapes happen, and should a finder call the rescue, you, or both in what order. Third, confirm your own vet knows this cat is a foster, holds the chip number on her temporary record, and understands she will move on. Write the answers on her foster folder, because in three weeks you will not remember which arrangement belonged to which cat.
Temporary Tagging for a Cat Who Is Not Yours
The chip will rarely point to your house, and during the placement your house is where she will escape from. Bridge that with a temporary collar tag engraved with your mobile number and the word foster, or the rescue's name if the rescue prefers its own number on tags. Use a quick-release collar, since foster cats exploring an unfamiliar garden or squeezing through a gap in a fence are at real snagging risk. If the rescue issues its own foster tag, photograph it next to her paperwork so its number is searchable on your phone during a stressful handover. Check the tag is still on at feeding time each day for the first week, when a nervous cat is most likely to have slipped a collar in a hiding place, and keep a spare tag ready because turnaround between placements leaves no slack for reordering.
The Departure Check Matters as Much as Arrival
When she is adopted or moves to another fosterer, run the check backwards. Confirm with the rescue what happens to the registration next, who updates it to the adopter, and by when, because chips left registered to a rescue or to you after adoption are one of the commonest reasons reunions fail months later. Remove your temporary tag, pass the adopter any chip documentation the rescue agrees should travel, and close her record at your vet so her file does not sit live under your address. That clean transfer is the point of KinsLe Transferrable Profiles, which move a cat's profile to her new owner with her history, records and routines intact instead of scattering them across the foster's folder and the rescue's files.