Did you know that you have to register your pet with your local government?

I won’t be surprised if no, you don’t. I get this a lot, “Oh, may ganon pala? [Oh, is there such a thing?]”

As mandated by Republic Act no. 9482, the Anti-Rabies Act of 2007, yes, you have to register your dog or cat with your local municipal or city government’s veterinary department. I can’t blame your ignorance of the law if you don’t see them nor you heard about them. But ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse to absolve you of your legal responsibilities.

There’s a good chance that you don’t see them or heard of them because there’s just too many of you and there’s too few of them. My colleague, Arrian, talked a great deal about the widening gap of outnumbered veterinarians and the tens of thousands of pets that they have to care for.

“Why do I need to register? What’s in it for me?”

When I explain that it’s a legal requirement to register one’s pet, the self-serving motivation of a practical Filipino kicks in, “Para saan? [What for?]”

Arrian pointed out that we register our SIM cards so we can use certain apps in our smartphones. We register our cars so we can drive on EDSA in the new Odd-Even Scheme without worrying about a hefty Php 10,000 fine. We apply for any valid government ID so we can enter gated buildings or communities. But when you register your pet, what does it give you? A free pass? No, in fact, even the gatekeepers of our pet-friendly establishments are as ignorant of the law as you. You know what’s in it for you? Free anti-rabies vaccination!

You know what, you are as spoiled as your furbaby. Unlike the examples I cited above, you don’t get free gas, free ID cardholder, or free mobile data credits. An anti-rabies vaccine shot can cost you between Php 550 to Php 1,500, depending on which veterinary clinic you bring your pet, it sometimes costs more with the add-on services expected from premium veterinary clinics. But you get this for free. Not once, every year!

For most pet owners, that’s enough single reason to register their pets. And you already comply with the top legal mandates of the Anti-Rabies Act of 2007. That is registration, identification, and vaccination.

Turning Pet Registration into a Collective Community Protection

But there’s more than free anti-rabies vaccines in registering one’s pet. For this specific article, I won’t get too technical on how it can be turned into targeted public health strategies by your local goverment veterinary clinic. I’ll talk about it in more relatable terms for you, the pet owner.

For some of my readers, they might be thinking, “We went to our LGU veterinary clinic and we’re told they’re already out of vaccines. Why would I register?”

How selfish of you. Hear me out.

Inventory of vaccines, how many does your LGU veterinarian need?

Vaccines are not produced out of thin air. It’s produced and bottled in world-class pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities overseas and shipped in refrigerated cotainers to our tropical islands. While it’s waiting for you to show up, it’s kept in large refrigerated storage facilities. That’s a lot of money just for your pet to get a free anti-rabies vaccine. Our local government veterinary clinics won’t throw money away by guessing,

“How many dogs and cats do I need to vaccinate in my city?”

“When is this cat due for the next annual booster shot?”

”Is this dog still alive?”

Rabisin® vaccine vials of Quezon City Veterinary Department’s cold-chain storage and special handling

If you don’t show up in a mass vaccination, the vaccine could be exposed to outdoor elements and expire. When they overstock, vaccines have short expiry dates, and the government throws away that taxpayers’ money. Money is not handed down to them in a whim. They request for a budget several months before the fiscal year. If that budget is approved, they have to report how they spent that money, meaning, were your pets vaccinated or not?

Successfully requesting a budget for your local government veterinary clinic is always an uphill endeavor, sadly, they’re the least of the local government’s concerns. The primary question your LGU veterinarian have to ask when planning a budget is, “How many dogs and cats do we have in the city?”

Scientific targets for herd immunity against rabies

Your LGU veterinarians don’t just need to vaccinate your pet. They need to vaccinate at least 70% of the population.

When you do the math, it is:

0.70 x [pet population]

So what is the value for [pet population]?

Rabies Herd Immunity Gauge of Brgy. Bagbag, Quezon City in October 2024 (Only 35.9% of the registered pet population out of the needed 70% were vaccinated against rabies, insights from Pawnec's Pet Pulse Intelligence)

It’s hard to determine that value if no one is registering their pets. You might think “Oh, my dog is already vaccinated against rabies. That’s not my problem.”, or worse, “My dog doesn’t step out of the gate. He lived his whole life in our garage.” First of all, 57% of human rabies infections are bite cases from their own dogs according to the Department of Health’s (DOH) report in 2023.

For each pet that you don’t register with the government, it’s a decimal reduction in their 70% vaccination target to achieve herd immunity against rabies. Your two dogs and one cat could very well be the difference between 69.9% and 70%.

…the Bureau of Animal Industry have set a heuristic estimate that our pet population is 10% of the human population. If you don’t have any alternatives, this is as accurate as it gets, unfortunately. That is the price of not registering our pets.

Because it’s virtually impossible to exactly count how many dogs and cats there are in a city’s population, the Bureau of Animal Industry have set a heuristic estimate that our pet population is 10% of the human population. If you don’t have any alternatives, this is as accurate as it gets, unfortunately. That is the price of not registering our pets.

Before we criticize our LGU veterinarians and BAI, let’s understand that heuristics can be a quick and easy way to make estimations in epidemiology, though they are not always accurate and can lead to biases. Heuristic estimation can be useful in situations where precise data is unavailable, but it's important to acknowledge their limitations and potential for errors, errors that could lead to a rabies outbreak.

So why do we need to vaccinate 70% of our pet population against rabies?

I don’t want to get too nerdy trying to explain the essential threshold parameter related to viral transmissibility of rabies called basic reproduction number. In simpler terms, it estimated that a rabies-infected dog can infect between 1.52 to 3.36 other dogs in their community.

This is not an academic paper, so let me simplify it. If we’re saying that a rabies-infected dog, on average, can infect 3.3 other dogs in their entire infectious period, then it means we need to vaccinate 70% of the dog population to contain the spread of rabies to other dogs.

How herd immunity prevented the spread of COVID-19, as visualized by MANA Medical Associates

This whole herd immunity thing is based on scientific facts, and I hope I don’t have to overemphasize the critical importance of herd immunity knowing that we all survived CoVID-19 because of vaccinating en masse the right threshold of people.

Registering your pets, whether they’re vaccinated or not, is your unselfish act to your fellow pet lovers and pet parents. It’s your little contribution to our outnumbered and overburdened LGU veterinarians for them to have a factual and scientific basis for their anti-rabies vaccination targets. If they’re going to vaccinate blindly against an unknown pet population, we are not making any meaningful progress to protect our own pets in the community.

Owning a pet is a privilege, who is entitled to this privilege?

Any decent pet lover or owner would sympathize with a victim of animal welfare violation. We donate to its causes, we report animal welfare violations, we condemn it.

More than 30 animals being rescued in neglectful backyard breeding operation in Macon County, Tennessee, USA (Photos from Animal Rescue Corps)

In a fine example of owning a pet is privilege, one only needs to look at the United States. Owning a pet doesn’t end with registration, one needs a license to own a pet. It’s a privilege given by their government. I know we’re long ways to go to reach that level of sophistication in regulating pet ownership. So let’s be real, how does registering one’s pet with the government protect our pets?

To be honest, it needs a systemic change. Registering needs to start with responsible breeders and shut down unethical ones. It needs massive and expensive spay/neuter programs. It needs more initiatives beyond what I can think of right now to affect systemic change. But I believe it starts from ourselves.

“I’ve been vaccinating and spaying/neutering pets my whole career. But when does it end? It’s an endless cycle.”

Registering our pet means we are owning up to the responsibility of our pet’s welfare. Would you still let your pet walk out your gate and cause inconvenience to your neighbors? Would you pay for your dog’s bite victim or cat’s scratch victim for their post-exposure rabies vaccination? Would you pay for your pet’s veterinary bills at the clinic? Registering gives you direct legal ties to these responsibilities. If you avoid pet registration, you’re avoiding these responsibilities. It would be easy to give up a pet without any legal ties to it.

I find the insightful take of Dr. Rey del Napoles on managing the pet population of Quezon City very wise when he said,

“I’ve been vaccinating and spaying/neutering pets my whole career. But when does it end? It’s an endless cycle.”

He added, “People think regulating ownership of pets is not good for business. Why would a veterinarian lose sleep over a pet owner who’s unwilling to settle their veterinary bills? What is there to lose for a pet supply store if the owner is not feeding their pet appropriate pet food? They don’t sell rice.”

A family of abandoned dogs in Tanza, Cavite reported to Loved by the Gapz - Animal Rescue Inc.

Contrary to common misconception by pet industry stakeholders about controlling our pet population, regulating the ownership of pets is not harmful to their business, in fact, it’s neither profitable to their business.

Registering our pets is not the transformational change we’re looking for in our animal welfare, but it’s a personal change that leads to this slow path to improved conditions for our pet’s welfare.

QCitizen Pet Benefits

We have fine examples of pet registration being put into good use such as the QCitizen Pets of Quezon City for their enviable QCitizen Pets benefits. Aside from the usual anti-rabies vaccination, they also offer spay and neuter services, animal adoption, free veterinary consultation, microchipping, stray animals as service dogs, and Petzada Rewards.

Cebu City’s Inclusive Animal Welfare Benefits

Dr. Alice Utlang of Cebu City’s Department of Veterinary Medicine and Fisheries (DVMF), have taken it a step further. Because of their strict enforcement of animal welfare policies, even their stray animals are registered after being captured, spayed/neutered, and then released back into their community.

“We don’t euthanize dogs unlike in other pounds where they pick up the dog, put them in the pound, and after three days if the owner does not claim them, they will be put to sleep,” said Dr. Utlang, adding that the DVMF only impounds dogs if they are sick, need treatment, and if they harm people.

This wouldn’t have been possible, or more importantly, safe for the general public, if these community dogs weren’t properly registered with the DVMF and identified with a microchip.

Dr. Utlang proudly confesses the city’s animal welfare policies are one of the reasons why Cebu City was recently ranked as the 2nd most pet-friendly city in Asia by the digital travel platform, Agoda.

Targeted Public Health Strategies

There’s more to pet registration than what you individually benefit from on the surface. I won’t get into too much detail about epidemiological interventions, let’s leave that to our LGU veterinarians. Simply put, your LGU veterinarian needs to understand the collective health of their pet population.

They need pet health information such as your pet’s species, age, breed, location density, spay/neuter and vaccination status, and more. These information help them identify uncontrolled breeding grounds of cats, warn pet households of anticipated risks of disease outbreaks like leptospirosis or rabies, or simply the return of an impounded dog or cat to its rightful owner.

Registered pets prevent secondary sale by thieves in the black market. If an LGU veterinary clinic and their partner animal welfare organization like the Animal Kingdom Foundation want to take a step further, even the triangulation of reported theft or missing dogs can lead to clues on the area of operation of illegal dog meat traders and animal offenders

But how does your LGU veterinary clinic collect these pet health information at scale?

Digital Pet Registration

Let’s be honest: who wants to commute to their local government veterinary clinic, especially when its location is often hard to find? If you're already hesitating, remember that you also need to bring your pet along. While this may not seem like a valid excuse, it's one reason many people find it challenging to register their pets and take them for anti-rabies vaccinations. For numerous pets in our communities, especially our kababayan’s bantays and mingmings, they may not have ventured beyond their usual spaces in the neighborhood. Taking them on a commute could be stressful for them, and they might even escape.

For many LGU veterinary clinics, the only opportunity for citizens to register their pets is during the once-a-year mass rabies vaccination held in their barangay, and that’s only if they are interested in the free rabies vaccination offered.

One of the most progressive local government veterinary offices we’ve encountered is in Baguio City. They have been implementing a digital pet registration system even before Pawnec developed this tool for LGU veterinarians. Baguio City was the first to pilot our innovative approach to pet registration, which has since evolved into its current form. We witnessed a model example of their effective pet registration system that collects all relevant pet health information, contributing to the city’s broader public health goals and promoting animal welfare. Despite occasional reports of animal welfare offenses in the city, they are responding to these issues with assistance from animal welfare organizations like Furvent Animal Rescue and Advocacy and Biyaya Animal Sanctuary.

Here’s an interesting trivia: the eHealth Card was conceived after a veterinarian’s skepticism in Baguio City, Dr. Juneleen Samaniego of Naguilian Veterinary Clinic, who noted, “Our vaccine cards do not have a control number, nor are they serialized, so uploading it to Pawnec as it is raises concerns.”

…while it may not seem essential, your veterinarian truly needs to understand your pet’s health status. Your pet’s well-being is intertwined with that of your neighbor’s pets, creating a network of care.

Having closely observed the operational conditions of these local government veterinary clinics and refined our system over several months, we are excited to announce that next week, we will launch the remote pet registration system for Meycauayan City. This new system will seamlessly integrate with the city’s local pet registry. With just a few taps and swipes, pet owners will have access to an all-in-one pet ID that includes their pet's vaccination record, microchip details, and smart ID tag.

Point-of-Care Recorder for Meycauayan City's Mass Rabies Vaccination in June 2025

So the next time your local government veterinary department calls for your pet’s registration, remember that while it may not seem essential, your veterinarian truly needs to understand your pet’s health status. Your pet’s well-being is intertwined with that of your neighbor’s pets, creating a network of care. With just a few taps and swipes, you can help shape a pet-friendlier world for all.