Nov
Would UK Dogs Benefit From One Single Lost Dog Website?
Written By Hamish Lazari . All rights reserved.
With all the current talk and behind the scenes manoeuvring regarding having a single lost and found dog site to record missing and found dogs, I turned my attention to the National Dog Warden Association one.
On the plus side it has every single United Kingdom Local Authority on it, it allows for details of the dog to be recorded, it also displays by postcode or local authority name those dogs found.
An advantage to the NDWA site is that apart from it being free, it is also non judgemental and has no area where contributors can make comments when blaming entire groups of people, the police or dog wardens in regard to perceived lack of action or actually being in the vicinity of an area where a dog has disappeared from.
Information is input by local authority dog warden’s and will be information relating to a legally seized dog that has come into the domain of a local authority dog warden service
With the NDWA site, dog wardens can either enter the information themselves or if their council has its own lost and found register it can be accessed via the NDWA site.
A number of the current plethora of lost/found sites charge a fee or may ask for a donation although many especially breed specific ones are free of charge as the motive of the volunteers is to obviously reunite a reported lost or found dog as soon as possible.
With the large amount of sites in use, it can take an age to trawl through them all if looking for a dog and how many sites do you report a dog lost or found to anyway?
If the government is looking for a single basic national site, it could do worse than look at the NDWA site which is currently in situ and ready to go and has been for a number of years.
It would be a simple procedure to add an area where lost dogs could be added by owners or local authorities.
I would think that having one system would be beneficial for everyone, the pet parent, shelters, rescues, microchip companies, and the whole pet friendly community. Here in the united States we have serious issues with confusion on what chip to use and what scanner works with all chips, it has really became a problem. I work for a company called helpmefindmypet.com and we have a International lost pet alert system that emails a poster out in a fifty mile radius to Vets, Shelters, Rescues, Breeders, Kennels, Groomers, and any one who is a member. We also do a one call program for Scanning stations to report chip numbers of found pets and we search all data bases and registries to find the caretakers of these animals. I would like to continue conversations regarding this subject and assist in any information that I can provide.
Best of Luck,
Rachel Cullen, Director of Shelter Outreach
866-699-3463 ext 107