Data shows that the number of household pets has increased in recent years. While there’s so much to enjoy about the wholesome pleasure pets can bring to a family and community, more cats and dogs in your neighborhood means continued challenges for your local clerks department, health department and animal control unit, too. Without a proper strategy, things like pet licensing, stray management, and animal vaccination can be impossible to keep organized.
In this guide, you’ll learn key aspects of a modern local health department animal control strategy, and learn how government technology can make the lives of government officials and pet-owning citizens substantially easier.
Local animal control plays an integral role in the health and safety of your local citizens, their pets, as well as stray and wild animals. Failure to do things like collecting pet licenses, spaying strays, and managing animal shelters could result in loose animals on the streets and an overpopulation of stray cats and dogs.
Here are key tips for the local health department, code enforcement, and animal control to consider to ensure public safety and keep pet-related data organized.
To keep animal management processes organized and reduce the number of strays on the street, here are strategic planning considerations for your local government:
Updated records also assist animal control in case a pet goes missing or if a biting incident occurs.
The latest available data is from 2022, and were a reported 70,000,000 strays nationwide. Your local government needs to have a game plan for mitigating the number of unvaccinated and non-neutered strays in the community, in the interest of public health and safety.
Vaccination of animals is critical to local public health of citizens and their pets. Consider which key vaccinations for cats and dogs need to be required in your community, as well as the process for getting house pets and strays vaccinated.
Some communities require spaying or neutering pets, as well.
Your local government needs to prioritize returning lost pets to their loved ones. Consider the course of action for notifying relevant animal control officials about a pet on the loose, as well as how the officials will go about tracking down the lost pet using GIS mapping technology, government communication channels, etc.
Dangerous animals like rabid dogs or invasive species pose a threat to local public health, as do decaying bodies of deceased animals.
Dog pounds are needed for keeping strays off of the streets. Your local government needs to prioritize modern impound technology and infrastructure for stray animals, and have inspection workflows in place to ensure the animals are living in sanitary conditions and being treated in a humane way.
No one wants to listen to their neighbor’s dog bark all day. Nor do most people want to see a dog walker leaving dog poop on their lawn.
Consider the key issues that can arise as a result of animals in your community, and put in place local policies to enforce responsible pet ownership.
Citizens play a key role in key local day-to-day animal control affairs. Use local public meetings, government social media profiles, and your animal control website to educate community-members about pet licensing and vaccination requirements, local policies pertaining to pets, as well as insight into wildlife like local invasive species that need to be eradicated and local endangered species that need to be protected.
Modern government software makes it easier for animal control to stay organized and work from the field.
Here are key ways that government technology can help your local health department and animal control manage pets and strays:
Optimizing your government website with online forms is a simple way to get pet-owners to register their pets.
Citizens simply add their pet’s information, their address, the pet’s vaccination status, their vet, and a few other key credentials (that your government can customize), pay an online registration fee via debit or credit card, and the pet license is automatically sorted in the cloud and made instantly accessible to applicable government officials.
Consider ways that government fee and fine processing can be moved online. .
Complaint management software allows citizens to report non-emergency issues directly to their local government. If a dangerous / sickly stray animal or loose pet is seen out in the open, community-members can send a message to animal control officials letting them know when and where the animal was spotted.
Learn more about How Complaint Management Software Improves Civic Engagement.
Code enforcement officials can issue fines from the field via a government field device like a tablet for violations such as a barking dog, pet without a lease in a public area, etc. Fines for violations can even be collected in real time right from a phone or tablet.
All paperwork related to a particular pet or stray (like medical & vaccination records, pet licenses, code violations, etc.) can be stored and easily accessible within the government cloud.
Using a local GIS map, government officials can pull up pet records alongside other key property records for a particular address.
GIS maps can also be used to track down animals in real-time. Whether a pet is on the loose or a rabid animal is spotted in a certain neighborhood by a government official or citizen, the area can be marked on the 3D map for animal control officials to use when tracking the animal down.
The pound, doggie daycares, adoption centers, pet spas, etc. need to abide by local health codes to ensure public health and the safety of the pets. When a local animal facility permit is requested, or a recurring inspection check-up is needed, inspectors can and should use a mobile inspection form to fill out quickly and efficiently with all of the relevant codes accessible within just a few clicks. Once an inspection of an animal facility is completed, the inspection records will be instantly stored in the cloud.
Your health department and animal control leadership can use data collected across processes to make better decisions in the future. What types of pets are being registered in the community? What parts of the community are seeing an uptick in strays? What percentage of impounded animals have been neutered? Which animal codes are being violated by pet owners?
Animal control oversees the management of pets and stray animals within a community.
Common aspects of animal control’s day to day operations include:
Dog and cat licensing is a means for the local health department to have clear insight into which homes / community-members have pets as well as a status on each pet’s vaccination records. When a pet goes missing and is found, animal control can use the pet license to return the animal to its rightful owner.
GovTech helps local animal control in the following ways:
Read on:
Sources
https://www.avma.org/news/pet-ownership-rate-stabilizes-spending-increases