Council’s Animal Services team has the responsibility to manage dog issues in the city. Our priority is community safety and we attend to complaints of aggression and attacks as soon as possible.
The dog population is growing at around 5% each year and we now have over 14600 known dogs. Our Animal Services team receives over 4,000 complaints every year. We impound nearly 500 dogs, of which 86% are returned home or adopted to new homes
In Tauranga, dog registration fees help to pay for most of our animal services activities, including:
- a dog registration database of over 14,600 dogs
- automatic reminder notices for registration of dogs
- dog owner education, including education programmes, material and dog bite safety programmes
- enhanced education program to target school children and at risk groups
- dog shelter facilities for the care, welfare and return of lost and stray dogs
- investigation, monitoring and resolution of dog issues such as nuisance, aggressive and dangerous dogs
- installation and maintenance of poo bag dispensers
- patrols of public places to protect public safety and enforcement
- four wheel drive beach patrols
- friendly and professional advice as well-educated dog owners are more responsible dog owners.
- dog owner education to assist in the reduction of the number of acts of aggression from dogs
- focus on helping to reduce the number of roaming dogs
In the last five years, our strategies together with help from the public have helped to reduce aggression against people by 31%, attacks on domestic animals by 12%, barking dogs by 14% and roaming dogs by 27%, at the same time dog numbers have increased by 17.6%.
Information for dog owners (338kb pdf)