Hm, here in King County, WA you can get a license thru the mail, by filling out an online form. It's very easy... why would anyplace else do it differently? The headache alone must make folks not want to even bother.

My city also provides licensing primarily through the animal services dept. directly, although some vets offer it as a courtesy. But many cities who have fallen prey to the "legislate your problems away" craze usually find that compliance drops off to nothing, so then they have to find other ways to force pet owners to comply. Forcing vets to keep up with it would be one tactic. But people do tend to resist laws they perceive as unfair or unreasonable. If Miami-Dade wants to increase compliance with pet licensing, they have to first of all reduce the frightening and unreasonable consequences of non-compliance (seriously, putting a LIEN on someone's HOME for letting a dog license expire!!?? If it was me, I'd go to great lengths to be sure the city doesn't even know I HAVE a dog) while at the same time showing people some benefit to the Animal Control/Services department. Enforcing leash laws to reduce loose dogs, responding in a timely manner to animal cruelty claims, expanding their efforts to find homes for pets in the shelter through off-site adoption days etc. Miami may already have a great AC dept - but if it's more like most cities and really isn't seen by the public as doing much other than operating a killing facility, then people just don't have much incentive to obey the law.
Incidentally, this is JUST the kind of response (reduced pet licensing compliance and reduced income) that the Responsible Pet Owners Alliance http://www.responsiblepetowners.org/ and other similar agencies tell City Councils will happen if they pass a lot of really restrictive laws - but they are rarely believed.

Thirty percent compliance is actually pretty high. Here in Ontario, it runs around 10% provincewide due to a complete abandonment of enforcement. You buy licences here at animal control or city hall.

Vets should dump licensing, turf it back to the city departments responsible.

Calgary, Alberta has over 95% licensing compliance. No breed bans, no mandatory neutering, no pet limits. Great bylaw, shelter is state of the art, staff are all post-secondary educated and very highliy paid and well equipped. They have 141 leash-free areas. Bite and euth rates continue to decline. In 2007 they had 130-something bite reports in a city of about a million. That's down from 200+ the year before.

Anyway, in Calgary you can buy a licence at animal services, at banks, city hall, online and in other venues. Works really well. And, of course, they enforce their licensing bylaw, since 90% of the animal services budget comes from that. The other 10% is from fines.

In Massachusetts we send proof of rabies vac and spay/neuter to the town clerk. No vets involved.

Oh, and around here, both dogs and cats are required to be licensed. And exotics are illegal in the whole state.

I am sorry that your practice is forced to do extra administrative work to do the governments job for them. I have been against those policies (vets having to check license status, in some jurisdictions having to report the names of animals to the county etc.). I think it is a lazy bureaucracy trying to get vet staff to do part of their job. They have conscripted you as unpaid government workers.

Of course, one wonders if ultimately the extra time usurped checking licences, ratting out clients to the county (which was proposed and perhaps passed for some jurisdiction somewhere - it was debated on Itchmo) gets passed on to the client.

And takes up staff time, time that could be spent thinking about and tending to our pets rather than doing the governments work for it.

MeriGray- If a pet has been euthanized, a copy of the certificate can be sent in. If the animal died due to a accident or at home for some reason, most pet owners contact their vet in these cases and most vet offices will write "deceased" on the pets record which should be kept and stored somewhere. I'm guessing that a copy of those types of records would suffice as well.

Don't quote me on this as not all states work the same way. The only problem I've had is with a vets office that euthanized a pet. They forgot to mark the dog's record as deceased in their computer and I got a set of reminders for her vaccine updates. They've never done it again, but I wasn't happy about it. The town never knew what happened and didn't ask for a license update, so I'm gathering that the town had a better clue of what was going on than that office did.