Animal advocates would do well to forget absolutely, totally, and utterly about trying to use licensing fees in any way, shape, or form to ever influence either pet keeping behavior or fund animal welfare programs.
This idea has an almost unbroken 200-year history of abominable failure almost everywhere that is has ever been tried, beginning in some of the 13 colonies before the U.S. was ever a nation. It has also failed with cats, goats, cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses, but we'll focus on dogs, since the record is longest and clearest as regards dogs.
The American SPCA took the New York City animal control contract in 1895 in exchange for the promise of all revenues from dog license sales. The ASPCA lost money for 100 consecutive years, & finally returned the contract to the city in 1994. Never was the New York City dog licensing compliance rate ever demonstrably pushed above 25%. Most of the time it was far lower.
Most other cities have had quite similar experience.
The idea that raising the licensing fee a little bit for unneutered animals could raise sterilization compliance was very successful for under 10 years, more than 30 years ago, between 1970 and 1980, beginning when the U.S. rate of dog sterilization was under 25%. By the time the dog sterilization rate rose to 50%, circa 1980, the amount of enforcement effort required to encourage sterilization through licensing demonstrably far exceeded the amount of effort that was needed to just persuade people to fix their pets voluntarily.
Nonetheless, many cities passed so-called "mandatory" dog sterilization ordinances, which were actually differential licensing schemes, whereby owners of unaltered dogs have to pay a much higher license fee. After about 10 years of this, the results were unequivocal: the cities with higher licensing fees just had higher rates of non-compliance with licensing than other cities nearby, with more animals coming into shelters and more homeless animals being killed.
The late Robert Lewis Plumb produced the first documentation of the effect. After he died, I followed up his effort 10 years later and found the same thing, made even more emphatically clear.
Almost everyone with good sense quit pushing for higher licensing differentials. That omits a good portion of the animal advocacy community leadership. However, Maddie's Fund -- the largest organization giving grants to dog & cat sterilization programs in the U.S. -- will not fund projects in communities with excessive licensing differentials, because the Maddie's Fund administrators have learned the hard way that wide differentials are just a disincentive to licensing dogs at all.
During the decades that I have reported on animal welfare, only two U.S. cities have ever claimed licensing compliance in excess of 40%, and only one of those could prove it. The national norm is between 15% and 25%, with the lowest compliance in the areas with the highest fees.
Amid all of this record of failure, there is one successful licensing program in North America, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Calgary built a successful program over more than 20 years of offering licensed dogs found running at large a free ride home, instead of impoundment, and waived fines for the petkeepers. A small fine was imposed for a second offense, with a higher fine for the third and fourth offenses.
Eventually Calgary imposed a small fine for the first offense, and in other ways has moved toward a much more conventional approach to licensing during the past 10 years -- but they achieved a community licensing compliance rate of more than 75% before they began incrementally increasing the fees.
The Calgary approach flat will not work in India, because in India dogs conventionally are allowed to roam at large. Therefore there is no incentive in giving dogs found roaming at large a free ride home. You could only make that an incentive by doing what Calgary and most other North American cities have been doing for more than 200 years: killing dogs found at large, if they are not reclaimed after being impounded.
This practice conspicuously failed to rid U.S. city streets of dogs until after low-cost sterilization programs began and successful efforts were made to sell the majority of dog-keepers on the advantages of voluntarily sterilizing their pets.
Merritt Clifton
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