Florence County, SC Animal Ordinances: Microchipping (2026)

Florence County's microchip requirement is narrow and tied entirely to the dangerous-animal registration scheme in Chapter 6. Section 6-12(d) requires anyone owning a dangerous animal, as defined in § 6-15, to register that animal with Environmental Services, supplying the owner's name, address, and phone number, the animal's breed, color, sex, weight, and age, the address of the premises where it is confined, and a description of the pen or run area used for outdoor confinement. Once that registration is complete, the code states directly that environmental services shall provide the owner registering the dangerous animal with a microchip, making the county, not a private veterinarian, the source of the chip for this category of animal.

00 registration fee, mandatory spay or neuter, and mandatory rabies vaccination. A separate microchip obligation applies to animals moving through non-profit rescue agencies: § 6-8(7) requires every animal adopted from environmental services and then passed to a third-party adopter through a rescue agency to be microchipped before that third-party adoption, regardless of whether the animal was ever declared dangerous. Outside these two situations, ordinary pet ownership and ordinary shelter adoption in unincorporated Florence County carry no county microchip mandate; the requirement exists specifically to let Environmental Services and law enforcement permanently identify animals that have already been declared dangerous or that pass through the rescue-agency adoption pipeline.