NORWICH — As the month of May draws to a close, it’s the job of Town Clerk Lily Trajman to turn over a list of delinquent dog owners to the Norwich Selectboard.

It names those residents who have failed to re-register their dogs with the town. The Selectboard publishes the list in its meeting packet.

Owners of all dogs 6 months of age or older in Vermont are required to annually renew their license with their town of residence. Registration is open from Jan. 1 to the end of March.

Beginning April 1, Trajman contacts any delinquent dog owners that she knows of by email.

As of last Friday, Trajman still had three dozen outstanding licenses.

“I think the form does put some people off,” she said.

The form in questions asks for the owner’s name, address, email and phone number, as well as the name and age of the dog in years and months, size (small, medium or large), sex (male, female, neutered), color, prominent breed and species. The owner must also submit the dog’s latest rabies vaccination. The owner then drops a check off at the Town Hall.

Even so, each year dog owners are late to register their dogs.

“I was constantly late at it until I became town clerk,” Trajman said.

Now her goldendoodle Rocky and labradoodle Sunny are 001 and 002 among the dogs of Norwich.

Dog licensing serves as an incentive for owners to stay up to date on rabies vaccinations, she said. It also helps reunite lost pets with their owners.

“I get a few calls a year saying we have dog number 372 here,” Trajman said. “Who can we call to talk about this dog? And I can look that up in the system.”

Language in the statute, 20 V.S.A. § 3806, allows the state to impound and euthanize any dog or wolf hybrid found without a license after the deadline to register has passed. But none of the Upper Valley clerks contacted for the story were aware of any dogs being euthanized for lack of a license.

In fact, enforcing dog-licensing is a annual challenge.

“Each year we have a few more (dogs) that don’t renew, and my role in enforcement is to simply send a renewal notice,” Thetford Town Clerk Tracy Borst said in an interview. “It’s not my role to go look for these dogs. We don’t have anyone doing that.”

Registered dogs are required to wear a collar or harness with the current license attached, according to statute. This legislation is clearly laid out in The Big Book of Woof, published by the Vermont Leagues of Cities and Towns Municipal Assistance Center, which acts as a handbook for Vermont municipal offices.

A mandatory $3 per license fee is imposed to help fund the state’s spay and neuter program. There is an optional surcharge of up to $10 that towns may levy to fund the operationa of a rabies control program if one has been established.

Registration fees, therefore, depend on the municipality in Vermont. In Norwich, before incurring penalties, it costs $13 to register an unspayed or unneutered dog, and a spayed or neutered dog is $9. In Thetford, it costs $11 to register a neutered/spayed dog, and $17 for a male/female dog. In Hartland, the fee is $9 neutered/spayed dogs and $13 for intact dogs.

According to Trajman, 537 dogs were registered in Norwich last year. This year, she expects about 550.

“We rebounded from COVID when we had around 300 dogs licensed. That wasn’t because there were only 300 dogs in town, that was because the licensing, like everything else, got a little loosey goosey in 2020,” Trajman said.

Trajman estimates that there are roughly 100 dogs that she doesn’t know exist, because they’ve never been licensed.

“I hope they’re living happy lives and I hope they’re up to date on their rabies vaccines,” she said. “The clerks are always talking about ways to make this even easier for people.”

Hartland Town Clerk John Paulette also doesn’t know what percentage of dogs are licensed in his town.

“It could be 99%, it could be 60%,” he said in an interview. “The policy is, when the deadline is up, you look at what dogs were licensed last year, and you compare them to the dogs that you have licensed for the current year,” he said.

Trajman would like the registration process to be done online.

“Our stumbling block is simply that we can’t accept credit card payments through the town website at this point,” Trajman said. “It’s a tedious part of my yearly duties. I really do feel bad having to chase people down for nine or eleven dollars.”

She pointed to the New Hampshire dog licensing laws, which require vets to give rabies vaccinations directly to the town clerk.

“I often get rabies certificates from New Hampshire-based veterinarians for dogs that live in Norwich that I’ve never heard of and have no record of,” she said.

Thetford and surrounding towns work with the Oxbow vet clinic in Bradford to hold annual rabies clinics. Rabies certificates are good for three years.

“I often have people saying to me if rabies certificates are good for three years, why aren’t dog licenses three years?” said Borst, who lost her beloved dog Josie in December. She was always licensed dog tag number one. Borst is now the recent dog mom to a 3-month-old miniature doxie, Lucy.

Borst said she thinks a three-year license wouldn’t be practical, “with people moving and animals dying.”

Ulla-Britt Libre can be reached at ulla-britt.p.libre.25@dartmouth.edu.

CORRECTION: Licensing a dog in Norwich, before penalty fees are incurred, costs $9 for neutered dogs and $13 for intact. A previous version of this story included incorrect costs for dog licensing in Norwich.