Chris Carter: Microchip best way to protect public

COMMENT

If a dog rushed up to your child in a park and attacked him or her, would you want to know who owned that dog, who should have been controlling it?

I would, and I think most people would also. That is why the Government is keen to gradually introduce microchip identification for dogs.

With better dog identification comes better dog control, increased owner responsibility and better public safety.

To identify a dog at present, three things must occur. First, the dog must be wearing an identification tag. Second, the local council must have properly recorded and updated the details of its owner. And third, the dog must have been registered in the first place for any identification tag or records to exist.

Unfortunately, our systems for ensuring each of these steps occur are failing.

Although we have ID tags on dogs, they regularly fall off. Irresponsible owners can deliberately take them off, and swap them for the ID tags of other dogs, disguising ownership. It is ridiculously easy to steal a dog and pass it off as your own.

Our record-keeping is fragmented across councils and the violent history of some dogs is being lost as they move with their owners between cities.

Our statistics on dogs are so bad that we cannot even say with certainty how many registered dogs we have in New Zealand, let alone accurately identify trends in attacks that we can act on.

I believe, and the Kennel Club, the SPCA, and the Veterinary Association agree, that universal microchipping provides a way of solving these problems.

It provides a safe, certain and painless method of identifying a dog, which cannot be easily lost or removed. It is compulsory for dogs in parts of Australia, and it is already used on pedigree dogs here.

The Government wants to introduce microchipping alongside a new $1 million national database to improve record-keeping and the tracking of dogs.

But we are not going to ask all New Zealanders to go out and get their dogs microchipped tomorrow.

In fact, under our proposal before Parliament no dog alive now that is already registered will have to get chipped during its lifetime unless it is deemed dangerous, menacing or is caught roaming.

Microchipping will be introduced only for dogs registered for the first time after June 2006.

The aim is that as dogs grow old, die and are replaced, we will in time end up with a fully microchipped population of dogs.

The advantage of this gradual approach is that it avoids placing significant costs on dog-owners now. The cost lies at some point in the future when you decide to get a new dog, and by that time the cost will be greatly reduced.

My officials estimate that by 2006 a microchip will cost between $12 and $20. If you decide to get the chip inserted by a vet, you will also have to pay the vet's consultation fee.

However, there is no requirement to get the procedure done by a vet. It is relatively simple and could easily be done by a trained dog control officer, lowering the cost even further.

Of course, microchipping is only going to have an impact if dogs are registered.

You only have to talk to councils to find out that not all are. The media have been quoting the example of Manukau, where there are an estimated 30,000 dogs and only 18,700 are registered.

The Dog Control Amendment Bill recognises this problem and deals with it.

For instance, the bill contains a new power for dog-control officers to seize an unregistered dog from private land. If that dog is not registered within seven days, it can either be destroyed or given to an owner who will register it and look after it properly.

With the passage of the bill, councils will no longer have any excuses for not going out and effectively tackling owners with unregistered dogs.

The infringement fees that can be levied on erring dog-owners are to be increased significantly, and councils can keep those fees. That means they will be able to recoup a greater proportion of the costs of better enforcement from irresponsible owners instead of responsible ones.

I think we would all applaud that.

* Chris Carter is the Minister of Local Government.