Jerusalem – The Israeli Ministry of Agriculture will enable public access to the phone number of dog owners on its nationwide database starting in June, following a decision by the Knesset Finance Committee yesterday (Tuesday).
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Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon asked the committee to extend an interim directive through the end of May. The Ministry said after that date a new mechanism is scheduled to take effect that would include a form allowing the dog owner to list his phone number on the registry. Dog owners who prefer not to expose their phone number will have to contact the ministry and request that personal data be removed.
The Agriculture Ministry’s central website for dog registration and veterinary services currently lists 385,882 dogs and displays information on their owners, including their full name and home address. Alongside the name of the dog and of its owner the site lists its date of birth, last vaccine, whether the dog is considered dangerous and when it was neutered or spayed.
“The information listed on the registry enables the public, animal organizations and municipal veterinary authorities to locate the owners of stray dogs and return them to their owners,” said the Agriculture Ministry. “In the event someone is bitten or attacked, it will be possible to uncover information on the dog, the validity of its license and its rabies vaccination, based on the data regarding the owner.
According to a Ynet report several months ago, the website has data on tens of thousands of dog owners who marked their pets with ID chips. The information was openly available so that through a simple search web users could find out the address, phone number and ID number of every dog owner.
The compromised privacy caused widespread public protest until the Ministry concealed the ID and phone numbers following intervention by the Knesset Finance Committee, which decided that “the public interest to create a database that would be reliable and publicly accessible overrides the interest of individual privacy.”
Now, with the renewed decision to allow access to full details – including phone numbers – many veterinarians will be able to more easily locate the owners of lost or aggressive dogs, even when the offices are closed.
the problem with this is, the irresponsible dogs owners, are the very ones who do not register their dogs in the first place, from my experience.
Oh. What a nice and good jewish (?) Land….
Will they do the same thing for yiddeshe yinglach who might get lost and be returned to their parents? The technology should be very similiar and easy to implement.
The dog’s date of birth is required to know if it was already Bark Mitzvah.
The permitted ownership of dogs is limited to services by mesora, i.e. guard dogs and by kal v’chomer, seeing eye dogs, therapy animals, etc. A dog should not be in the house on Shabbos, al pi Kabala. Spiritually sensitive Jews won’t have a pet dog for that reason.