Question for ANIMALS 24-7 from a reader:
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Our local animal control agency has proposed a county-wide ordinance to require all veterinarians in the county to report the personal contact information for each person who brings a pet to be vaccinated.
“This information is to be used to try to increase licensing compliance, as an attempted revenue generator.
“What do you think of this?”
(Beth Clifton collage)
ANIMALS 24-7 responds:
Apparently there is no idea so stupid that it will not be picked up and recycled, even after more than a century of ignominious failure all over the world.
The idea of requiring veterinarians to report clients to increase licensing compliance has been tried over and over again since 1895, when the American SPCA imagined that this was among the ways they could make licensing pay the cost of providing animal control service to New York City.
The ASPCA lost money every year on the New York City animal control contract for 100 consecutive years, finally abandoning it in 1994.
Even when some veterinarians actually sold dog licenses, licensing compliance remained low.
(Transport Accident Commission Australia image)
Veterinary resistance
Veterinary resistance to participating in pet licensing schemes has always been intense.
Reporting people who bring their pets to receive veterinary care is, first of all, an obvious nuisance, and feels to most vets like a violation of patient confidentiality, even in states where such reporting requirements have been found to be legal by the courts.
Second, people often come to a vet in the first place because an ailing or injured animal needs costly treatment.
Most veterinarians insist that the animal receive a complete physical examination, and rabies vaccinations, as a reasonable part of the course of treatment.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Low income pet-keepers
But this does cost money, and contributes to the reality that low income people and people on fixed incomes, or with large numbers of pets, often defer seeking vet care because of the cost.
If those pet-keepers additionally fear getting socked with a licensing fee, and perhaps a fine as well, for an animal who may be close to death, they may not bring their sick and injured animals to a vet at all. This does not serve the interests of the petkeepers, the veterinarians, the animals, or society as a whole.
Third, many people go to veterinarians who are not even within their licensing jurisdiction.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Lower vaccination compliance
But the biggest reason of all why vaccination compliance should not be tied to licensing is that it tends to lower vaccination compliance. This has been seen over and over again since vaccination first became the norm for U.S. pets in the 1945-1955 time frame.
Initially, licensing was envisioned as a mechanism for ensuring vaccination, but petkeeper surveys made clear as early as 1960 and very firmly by 1980 that vaccinating animals had become vastly more popular than licensing ever was.
Around that time various jurisdictions began trying to use vaccination records, more specifically than just veterinary visits, to enforce licensing.
What this accomplished was to suppress vaccination rates in many of the poorest communities, where rabies vaccination was and is most needed.
(Beth Clifton collage)
U.S. trails in immunization
Currently only about 55% of the pets in the U.S. have been vaccinated against rabies, or about a third of pet cats and two-thirds of pet dogs. This is dangerously below the 70% threshold for preventing outbreaks.
Even though canine rabies was officially eradicated from the U.S. about 40 years ago, we are not immune from the possibility of rabies crossing back into the U.S. from Mexico, or crossing back into dogs from rabid wildlife.
If anything lowers vaccination compliance, we are headed farther into dangerous territory.
Jindo dog at a Berkley dog park. (Beth Clifton photo)
Increasing licensing compliance conveys no societal advantages
Increasing licensing compliance conveys no societal advantages, economic or otherwise, that come close to the advantages of maintaining a safely high vaccination rate. Indeed, the average cost of handling even one human rabies case exceeds the average annual cost of providing animal control service to a community of half a million people.
Because licensing schemes seem to promise badly needed revenue for animal care-and-control, animal care-and-control agencies, and the municipal governments that fund them, have long cherished the notion that through some combination of increased fees and increased enforcement, they could raise compliance rates to the point of making animal control operations self-sustaining.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Licensing rarely––if ever––fully funds animal control
This has rarely happened. The data below shows why.
The survey data dates to 2002, making it now twenty years old, but even with the advent of microchipping and quick-and-easy online pet licensing renewal, few communities report licensing compliance running above 25% of their estimated populations of animals eligible to be licensed.
Further, it is still evident that higher licensing fees contribute to lower compliance rates.
Former Calgary animal control chief Bill Bruce, now consulting for the pit bull advocacy group Animal Farm Foundation.
Calgary
At this point in the discussion, advocates of raising revenue through licensing usually mention the unprecedented and unequalled success achieved in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Calgary, under former police officer Jerry Aschenbrenner, who headed Calgary Animal Services from 1975 until 2000, pushed estimated dog licensing compliance close to 90% at peak, but achieved this by making licensing very convenient, very inexpensive, and a valuable service to the pet keepers, in that licensed pets found at large received a free ride home.
The former Calgary success story, though, eventually ceased to be a success story.
(See Pit mix fatality spotlights failure of so-called “Calgary model.”)
Longtime Calgary resident Betty Ann “Rusty” Williams, left, in the alley where three pit bulls killed her. See Calgary asks why 86-year-old pit bull victim waited 30 minutes for ambulance. (Beth Clifton collage)
Why the “Calgary model” disintegrated
After more than 25 years of steadily increasing licensing compliance and an exemplary record in reducing shelter killing and protecting public health and safety, Calgary animal control under Aschenbrenner’s successor, “Bylaw” Bill Bruce, began trying to use their licensing program as a revenue generator, jacking up the licensing fees.
Since then, licensing compliance appears to have fallen off sharply, especially among keepers of pit bulls, and Calgary has become, in recent years, the dogfighting and dog attack capital of Canada.
While Calgary Animal Services is still supported by licensing revenue, it will have to get the scofflaw element under control, which it seems to be far from doing, before it can again claim to provide a successful operating model for other communities.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Dog & cat licensing compliance, costs, and effects
Regulations of any kind seldom succeed unless a large majority of the people or institutions to be regulated are already voluntarily in compliance or willing to become compliant with relatively little nudging at the time that the regulations start to be enforced.
If more than a small percentage object to a regulation enough to become scofflaws, the enforcement burden becomes overwhelming, and the regulation eventually tends to be ignored or repealed.
Chow chow. (Beth Clifton collage)
The numbers
Dog and cat licensing follows the trend.
Compliance with pet licensing tends to be less than a third of the 90% compliance rate that is usually the minimum needed for regulations to be within the reach of effective routine enforcement.
Therefore, as of 2002 there was no demonstrable relationship between the rates of licensing compliance claimed by animal control agencies in eight representative cities which had each purported to enforce dog licensing for 20 years or more (in some cases 100 years or more), and their rates of dog and cat killing per 1,000 human residents:
City Dog/cat licensing rate Killed/1,000 in 2002
Tucson 57% 42.9 Chicago 25% 18.2 Philadelphia 25% 19.7 Seattle 25% 11.2 San Francisco 15% 2.6 Salt Lake City 13% 9.9 Fort Worth 10% 32.1 Milwaukee 10% 10.5 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– U.S. average 28% 16.8
All of these cities are now killing fewer dogs and cats per 1,000 human residents.
There is no evidence to suggest their licensing compliance rates have increased, however, while there is substantial evidence to suspect that licensing compliance in Tucson has plummeted.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Compliance vs. cost of license
There is a demonstrable relationship between compliance and the cost of a license.
The lowest license fees, on average, are charged in the Northeast, including the New England states, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and these states do appear to have the highest rates of licensing compliance.
The next lowest fees are charged in the Midwest, with the next highest rates of compliance. The highest fees are charged in the West, whose compliance rate is only two-thirds of the rate in the Northeast.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Disincentive to spay/neuter
However, contrary to the findings of single-city surveys done mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, before the majority of owned dogs and cats in the U.S. were sterilized, charging markedly higher fees to license unaltered animals appears to create a disincentive to licensing more than to encourage more people to get their pets fixed.
The lowest differential between the average cost of licensing intact versus altered dogs, as of 2002, was in the Northeast, which as well as having the highest rate of licensing compliance also had a shelter killing rate of approximately half the national average.
(Beth Clifton photo)
The widest differential was in the West, where shelter killing rates ranged from some of the lowest in the U.S., along the West Coast, to some of the highest, in the Southwest.
The next widest differential was in the South, with the lowest licensing compliance and shelter killing rates tending to run between two and three times the U.S. norm.
The Midwest, with a relatively low licensing differential and relatively high compliance, had shelter killing rates which mostly clustered just above the U.S. norms.
West Midwest Northeast South
Dog license, intact: $28.21 $11.72 $ 9.72 $17.86 Dog license, altered: $10.50 $ 4.70 $ 4.58 $ 5.93 Dog licensing compliance: 24% 28% 32% 10%
The dog licensing sample size per region was in the low dozens, roughly proportionate to human population distribution, and appeared to be representative of both urban and rural areas.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Cat licensing
Cat licensing is still so rare and compliance so low––something that has not changed a whit since 2002––that any data pertaining to it is inherently suspect, available from at most only about 25% as many jurisdictions as the dog licensing data.
Nonetheless, it seems to follow the same general pattern. ANIMALS 24-7, however, as of 2002 was unable to identify any jurisdiction in the Southern states which had tried to license cats.
West Midwest Northeast South
Cat license, intact: $20.00 $ 9.67 $ 8.20 n/a Cat license, altered: $ 7.00 $ 7.00 $ 4.60 n/a Cat licensing compliance: 15% 2% n/a n/a
(Beth Clifton collage)
Just limit the numbers
The oldest regulatory approach to pet overpopulation, directed at preventing public nuisances rather than at preventing animal suffering, was to limit the number of dogs and/or cats per home.
This approach has recently been dusted off and pushed again here and there as a purported defense against backyard breeders and animal hoarders.
There is no evidence that it has ever worked, or will work, since enforcing pet limits is as difficult as enforcing licensing.
But ANIMALS 24-7 was able to identify the thresholds at which all but a few dog and cat keepers would comply with pet limits.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Thresholds
The table below shows at left the percentages of pet keepers who keep common numbers of animals, and shows at right the percentages of animal control ordinances that set limits at each number.
Limits restricting the number of dogs per household to four or fewer, and the number of cats per household to six or fewer, would appear to start out with high enough compliance that effective enforcement might be possible, at least in theory.
Dogs/household Limits allow Cats/household Limits allow
62% / one 2% / one 48% / one n/a 25% / two 26% / two 28% / two 19% / two 7% / three 35% / three 11% / three 38% / three 6% / four+ 20% / four 13% / four+ 24% / four 4% / five 8% / five 4% / six 5% / six
Beth & Merritt Clifton.
(Geoff Geiger photo)
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Thank you for this in-depth, very well-researched and informative article, and for saying what I’m sure most of us feel and believe: in short, “NO”.
This is outlandish. This is not a police state. It is being a good citizen to comply with the mandated rabies shot and personally I do not give immunization shots to any of my indoor animals after 6 years old. If the proceeds from the licenses went to either having a better shelter situation for homeless pets with good care and good health care and allows them to have adequate time to get adopted if they are adoptable, and if the owner wants their name given, that would be worthwhile but if none of these things are part of the plan, then it is a horrible idea. There are so many people that want to exploit dogs, the line would be quite long. Being a homeless dog is being one step from death. Our country destroys 4 million each year.
The number of dogs killed in U.S. shelters was last as high as four million circa 1990, and has declined in almost every year since circa 1970. The toll in 2012 was just under 1.5 million, including 910,000 pit bulls. Pit bulls from 1986 to 2012 rose from 2% of the dogs received by U.S. shelters to 38%, and from 5% of the dogs killed in U.S. shelters to 63%. ANIMALS 24-7 expects to publish the 2013 shelter killing data, still being compiled, toward the end of June 2014.
I agree, this is a STUPID idea, one of the mandatory type of laws that actually leads to FEWER pets being licensed. If they go ahead, even FEWER will be vaccinated! No one will come out even if free vaccine clinics are provided. I agree with basic initial vaccines, where appropriate, but have educated my self about overvaccination risks and will not be subjecting our animals to that.
I know of negative and positive ways that lead to more pets having ID.
The big stick way is to make it mandatory and start harassing people, peeking in their windows and doors, etc. I know a for-profit animal control that does this in City #1. They kill pets for space at their undersized “shelter”, and don’t even post stray pets online. There is a pet limit law in place, and they make money on fines so those who want to register all their pets are automatically fined. I’m not making this up.
City #2 has a high[er?] compliance rate for dog licensing, but has high fines if you don’t comply, with possible jail time. Return to owner rate is very high. Pet owners also get a pet rewards card good at a variety of businesses that more than offsets the price of licensing. Those who can’t afford a license are reportedly provided one because there’s a fund people donate for that. Services are reportedly provided in exchange for license fees:
– Pets running at large get their first ride home free if they are currently licensed and wearing some form of ID, including microchip.
– Pets at large are taken directly home and not to the shelter, whenever possible.
– License fees are 100% used to help animals. Fees pay for vetting shelter animals and for vetting injured stray animals. Supposed to pay for educating children on dog safety, and educating public on responsible pet ownership. Fees paid for building spay/neuter clinic owned by city, and free s/n provided to those who qualify, targeting certain areas of city where more strays come from.
– city does not have mandatory spay/neuter (MSN), no breed specific laws (BSL), because wants ALL pets to be registered. Compliance rate said to be about 95% for dogs and 55% for cats.
– they had a growing city but did not have to build a bigger shelter due to very high return to owner (RTO) rate. If shelter starts getting full, leadership takes to TV and other media to advertise this fact and ask for people to come adopt ASAP.
– The are fairly transparent with their data and statistics.
– All ordinances (local bylaws) are also in plain language, often with explanations (SHOCKING, I know), and they do lots of outreach and PSAs.
I don’t think city #2 is perfect, because I wonder if similar compliance could be reached with mostly the “carrots”, the pet rewards card program and all the benefits provided by providing actual services that pet owners need and are proven to make their community much safer from any dog bites.
A small town I know of provided free ID for pets. I don’t know their compliance or RTO rate though. Animal services is provided by a for profit company that appears to do a good job of getting pets adopted and says they don’t kill for space.
City #2 sounds like Calgary, whose licensing operations and other programs were quite impressive in the decade 2000-2009. Since then, however, the Calgary pit bull situation has gone so rapidly and catastrophically backward that Calgary is now a prime example of why a city must have breed-specific legislation mandating that pit bulls be sterilized, if it is either to adequately protect the public and other animals, or significantly reduce impounds and shelter killing.
I can’t speak to city or country ordinances requiring licensing, but the state licensing program in Pennsylvania has been a huge success. The fees generated from state dog license fees pays for 59 state dog wardens for state wide animal control work including the enforcement of their regulations on all dog kennels and commercial breeding establishments. It generates enough revenue that most years a significant amount is returned to local animal shelters through grants. In other states, it is an ongoing battle to fund enforcement efforts and trying to convince legislators to take money away from the general budget to fund inspectors for dog breeders. The licensing fees in PA remain in a “restricted account” and have made enforcement of their dog laws self-sufficient. I am not sure why such efforts at the local level are not as successful. One possibility is that the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is very aggressive in the enforcement of their licensing law and diverts a significant amount of its efforts in doing so. The rewards, however, are significant for puppy mill dogs. and other dog related items in the state.
With due respect, Bob, and that is quite a lot for your decades of work to investigate and expose puppy mills, expose animal abuse, and seek appropriate humane legislation, you are in Missouri, and the view of the Pennsylvania dog licensing program from within Pennsylvania is very different. Reported Mary Young of the Reading Eagle on February 28, 2012, “The [Dog Law Restricted Account] in a typical year takes in about $6 million in licensing fees and fines from dog law enforcement. That is considerably less that the more than $8 million it costs the Agriculture Department to enforce the dog laws.” Young published data showing a 1% average annual decline in licensing compliance in recent years. Explained Amy Warden of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Harrisburg Bureau on January 24, 2012, “The fund pays salaries for 92 positions (19 of which are now vacant) within the Department of Agriculture – most of them dog wardens who inspect almost 3,000 kennels in Pennsylvania and enforce the dog law. The fund also is used to compensate farmers for livestock killed by dogs and coyotes and provides grants to local humane societies around the state.” The fund had a positive balance of $14 million in 2007, but $4 million was transferred to the Pennsylvania general fund in 2010 to help cover a deficit, the dog law programs continued to operate at a deficit, and by 2013 tbe Dog Law Restricted Account was nearly broke. Lack of funding for the costly canvassing needed to boost compliance was a contributing factor: Delaware County, with an estimated 141,000 dogs, sold only 12,000 licenses, for an 8.5% compliance rate. Philadelphia, with an estimated 390,000 dogs, sold fewer than 20,000 licenses, a compliance rate of less than 5%. PADogLicense.com president Jason Alba told Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Mari A. Schaefer that the Pennsylvania statewide licensing compliance rate may be about 20%, but the highest compliance rate in the state for which ANIMALS 24-7 has data was just 20.5%, in Delaware County in 2007, after a year-long enforcement drive. Comparing gross totals of licensed dogs (920,797 in 2011) to the estimated Pennsylvania dog population of 2,485,000, according to the U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook published by the American Veterinary Medical Association, suggests a compliance rate of 37.5%, but nearly a third of the total appear to be either dogs who have been licensed for life, or are licensed to commercial breeding kennels.
I believe it depends on your definition of success. If the success of the PA law is based on the percentage of dogs that are licensed, then it would not be unreasonable to argue that the law has not been successful.
If you determine success, as I choose to do, by how much revenues it has generated for enforcement efforts to protect dogs in the state, then I would deem it extremely successful. In other states, it is an ongoing battle every year fighting for funds to be taken out of general revenues for enforcement efforts for regulations on commercial breeders. In contrast, Pennsylvania has a dedicated source of revenue every year from state dog license fees that has over the years provided sufficient funds for enforcement of its state dog law. It is a model that is envied by most animal advocates across the country that have to face budget battles with their state legislatures on a continuing basis.
As with any law, no matter how good, it doesn’t necessarily mean that such law will be implemented efficiently and fairly as stipulated by statute. The PA Dog Law Restricted Account is no exception to bureaucratic mismanagement and even illegal acts.
I was appointed by Governor Rendell to serve on an ad hoc committee to review the PA Dog Law in 2006, due to concerns about the lack of enforcement efforts and general mismanagement by the Bureau of Dog Law. Our committee discovered, among other failings, that the agency was allocating grants and disbursements from the Dog Law Restricted Account to local animal shelters in return for political favors from legislators in the districts of such shelters. These excessive grants were depleting funds from the Restricted Account.
In addition, due to gross mismanagement, we discovered that little effort was being afforded to licensing efforts to replenish the funds being diverted from the Restricted Account. As a result of other failings of the Bureau, as exposed by our committee, there was a complete shake-up of the Bureau of Dog Law and new management. Under reforms implemented, Dog Law not only became an effective enforcement tool to protect dogs in commercial breeding establishments, but was more than adequately funded to perform such tasks via revenues generated from dog licensing.
Unfortunately, due to an unprecedented economic downturn and resultant dramatic decline in state revenues, the Restricted Account was raided “illegally” to help fund other government services. Following this significant depletion of funds, a new governor was elected and there was an administration change in the Department of Agriculture, and a new Director of the Bureau was appointed.
Regrettably, there was once again bureaucratic mismanagement of the agency in general and specifically there was misconduct related to the Restricted Account. The PA State Auditor revealed that the Restricted Account was being used to pay for expenses not related to Dog Law including the salaries of at least 12 state employees who had no connection with the Bureau of Dog Law. As a result, the Bureau Director was removed and there was another management shake-up.
Animal advocates in PA, however, seem confident that the program is currently working well and every animal advocate in the state that I am aware of, believes that the PA Dog Law does work when adequately managed. Certainly, after years of mismanagement, illegal raiding of the fund, and recent illegal disbursement of funds for state programs not associated with Dog Law, it will take some time to bring funding back to normal.
Having worked in numerous other states on the “puppy mill” issue, I firmly believe that PA is a model for the funding of state enforcement efforts. In all fairness, I should point out that I worked very hard towards the passage of the first major revamp of the PA Dog Law in 1982 as well as towards significant amendments to the Act in 2008. So it might be natural to defend something I worked so hard to achieve.
It was very clear, however, to all the members of Governor Rendell’s ad hoc committee, after an intense and thorough review, that when the Bureau placed adequate emphasis on licensing, and when such license fees were spent strictly on the functions of the bureau of Dog Law, that such fees were more than sufficient to fund the Bureau, and in fact, in most years, there were surplus funds that could be distributed as grants to shelters in the state that were most in need of funding.
If we judged and condemned all laws on animal welfare issues based on how they are implemented and managed and effectively enforced, there would be few laws left in existence to protect animals. As you know better than most, passing laws is merely the first step. We must continually monitor and advocate for their effective enforcement. Interestingly, in reference to PA, even when operating at its worst, the state dog licensing program in PA still provided millions of dollars towards enforcement efforts to protect dogs. I believe that critiques of how the fund has been mismanaged at times, should not be taken as a general condemnation of the law itself.
The Montgomery County Maryland Veterinary Medical Association successfully sued Montgomery County Animal Control over this issue. Maryland Health Departments required the triplicate Rabies Certificate to be used for all vaccinations from licensed vets, the only vaccinations for dogs, cats and ferrets that will meet the state law requiring these animals to be vaccinated. The certificate pages were to go to owner, veterinarian’s records and health department. The veterinarian’s case was based on client privilege on the basis that the health department could use the information for license enforcement which can result in fines.. The MCVMA prevailed and veterinarians are no longer required to send forms to the state. However, they must produce proof of rabies when requested during an animal bite investigation. It is still a state law that veterinarians report anyone who REFUSES to vaccinate a cat, dog or ferret.
Same thing is happening in the UK. This is what was posted on our group when we put up a link to your artice”
“My delightful environmental health officer Susan Clowes contacted my vets to obtain proof I’d had puppies vaccinated so she could use that to prove I’d had a litter. Well done Susan – using proper care as a weapon against people. So now people will either not vaccinate pups or take them far away for it. Bet she’s so proud.”
All licensing does is penalise the good a law abiding owners in order to deal with those who simply don’t care. They will never buy licenses and worse, many good owners don’t want to be on government databases that can be hacked by theives or others with agendas.