Pet registration will help punish bad owners: HCMC authorities

The HCMC Department of Agriculture and Rural Development is building temporary measures for the management of dogs and cats. Specifically, pet owners may be required to register their pets regularly with ward People's Committees. Regulations also encourage pet owners to tag their pets with chips, which would help with managing information about their breeds and vaccination history, among others.

Nguyen Huu Thiet, deputy head of the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Sub-department, said the law already covers regulations on vaccinating and muzzling pets, but they have not been specific enough. As such, the agriculture sector has requested initiatives on managing dogs and cats in urban areas so that there would be clear policies for violating owners.

The criteria would be appropriate in accordance with the number of pets in a family.

Thiet said pet registration should be carried out twice a year, and within three days of getting a pet, to ensure disease prevention and to record statistics.

There are many applications for pet management, mainly being managed by units of the veterinary sector. These applications have not been in sync yet, and once the policies are in place, they will have to be synchronized and share data together for the sake of smoother management.

Besides registration, the sub-department said patrol teams watching out for dogs let loose would ramp up their activities. Unregistered dogs and cats would be dealt with by these teams as well.

"Only by doing both together can the problems of pets being let loose or defecating in public be addressed," Thiet said.

Thiet, however, added that such patrol teams have issues with finding personnel and where to keep the captured pets. Fining owners over their pets also sparks controversy. Right now, only 59 communes and wards in HCMC have teams that capture roaming pets, accounting for one-fifth of the total.

HCMC has over 184,000 dogs and cats being raised by over 105,000 families. Each family raises 1.74 pets on average in five downtown HCMC districts. The municipal Center for Disease Control said around 10,000 people have been vaccinated every month since the beginning of this year due to animal bites, an increase of around 1,000 from the same period last year.

Nguyen The Dung, chairman of Ward 14 People's Committee in Go Vap District, said the new policy would help localities fine pet owners who let their pets roam free and unmuzzled in public, among other violations.

While there have already been policies to fine pet owners with violations, local authorities want there to be concrete, persuasive evidence for every fine. Several conflicts in Go Vap have risen because of the actions of pets.

"The requirement to get pets registered with authorities is an important step that helps with the fining of violations," Dung said.

For the management of dogs and cats to be effective, Dung said there needs to be strong enough policies against owners of unregistered pets. Applications for registering and managing pets would also be needed, where owners can register their pets online through image recognition and data like species, breed, color and weight. People can also report cases of pets roaming free through such applications.

Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, chairman of Hiep Binh Chanh Ward in Thu Duc City, agreed that the registration of pets would help authorities fine owners more easily if violations occur. Last year, a local patrol team of 12 people had captured over 200 dogs and cats and fined more than 100 owners for several violations, he added.

While patrol teams have proved effective, deploying them is time-consuming and requires personnel. Many pet owners also do not cooperate with them.

Tuan said that over the past few years, local authorities have encouraged owners to get their pets registered, but only to get rough statistics on their numbers, not data for identification. If an unmuzzled pet is found in public, it would not be possible to pinpoint who its owner is. As such, the addition of data for identification would help authorities find owners more easily.

On the proposal to tag pets with chips, Duong Kien Trung, director of the Le Trung Pet Company, said tagging them with chips would be simple and harmless. A device, as small as a grain of rice, would be implanted below the skin on the nape of the pet, storing a code with 9-15 digits, and the cost would be no more than VND500,000 (US$20). When another device is used to scan the chip, it will display information on the animal's species and vaccination data, as well as its owner.

Currently, pets only have to be tagged with chips to get through customs for air transportation.