Western Australia wants to join 137 local councils’ pet registers into a single repository for tracking the ownership, microchipping, breeding, sterilisation and transfer of the state’s cats and dogs.
The proposed statewide pet registration system is part of the McGowan Government’s 2017 election promise to crack down on puppy farms, stop backyard breeding, and turn pet shops into adoption centres restricted to supplying abandoned, stray and surrendered dogs and cats.
The system will enable local government staff, pet owners, rangers and pet shops to meet the responsibilities made law by amendments to the Dog Act 1976 and Cat Act 2011 that parliament passed in December 2021.
Pet owners, who are now required to sterilise their dog at age two unless their council approves an exemption, will be able to use a self-service interface to pay registration fees, transfer ownership, report an animal lost, deceased or stolen and update other required information.
Councils will be able to share reports about dog attacks, barking complaints, individuals with animal cruelty convictions and other previously siloed records.
The Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries (DLGSC) released details of the registry proposal via a tender last week.
It’s a demanding brief: the integrator will have six to 12 months to migrate an estimated 400,000 cat and dog registrations from the 137 databases onto a single repository.
To complicate matters, 20 percent of WA’s councils use paper-based manual tracking systems and five percent use Excel.
Eleven other systems are used by the local governments, with IT Vision’s Synergy and Civica Authority being the two most popular, at 33 percent and 16 percent respectively.
The number of end users could reach 550,000, the tender documents state.
They include pet owners, veterinarians, breeders, animal shelter employees, RSPCA, law enforcement, microchip implanters and the general public: all with different access privileges.
There will be an additional 1000 “core users” of the system who can create, amend and remove other users’ access, configure system settings and access all reporting functions. Core users will be made up of select staff from DLGSC and local government, including rangers.
It’s predicted an average day will see requests from 600 end users and concurrent use by 50 core users.
Traffic will also increase during the pet registration renewal period in October each year to 10,000 to 20,000 end user requests.
“The system should be able to handle an increase of 2.7 percent per annum (around 5500 to 11,000) users over the [three year] term of the contract so that the system can absorb additional users as the population grows,” the tender states.
“There is also an expected annual increase in dog and cat ownership of 1.5 percent each.”
According to the tender’s ‘technology (cyber) liability’ clause, DLGSC require the successful contractor to have cyber insurance of at least $40 million for any one claim.
The insurance must cover public disclosure of personal or corporate information, loss or damage of property, including data, breach of confidentiality or privacy, and an act by an unauthorised person or entity resulting in loss damage or destruction to the computer system used by the contractor.
The tender closes on February 21.