Animal Control Software for Officers & Agencies

Built for Animal Control Agencies

Animal control agencies need more than basic shelter software. Your officers are in the field responding to calls, managing bite cases, tracking mileage, and maintaining inventory — all while running a shelter operation. Pet Friend's Shelter Plus plan combines complete shelter management with a dedicated officer module designed specifically for animal control work.

What's Included in Shelter Plus ($100/month)

Everything in the Shelter Plan, plus:

• Humane Officer Module — Dedicated tools built for animal control officers and dog wardens
• Ordinance Library — Your local ordinances entered once, with codes, descriptions, pre-set fines, and standard verbiage
• Multi-Ordinance Citations — Any number of ordinances on one citation, each with its own fine and per-citation wording, totalled automatically
• Remote Signatures & Receipts — Send the full notice by email or text, or sign on your device; signers get a receipt with their signed copy, and a payment receipt when the fine is paid
• Remote Fine Payment — Text or email the fine as a secure payment link (Stripe, Square or PayPal), take the card at the counter on a reader, or record cash — every route files back to the citation
• Bite Case Tracking — Victim details, the location of the incident, quarantine dates worked out from the bite date, and an animal you can describe when it was never in your system
• Call Records — Log incoming calls with location, caller contact, type, and assigned officer
• Case Management — Track investigations from initial report through resolution, with evidence photos, video, and documents
• Linked Records — Calls escalate into cases; citations and bite reports link back to the case and the call, visible in both directions
• Mileage Tracking — Log officer mileage for reimbursement and fleet management
• Inventory Management — Track equipment, traps, vehicles, and supplies assigned to officers
• Animal Registration/Licensing — Manage dog licenses, registrations, and renewals for your jurisdiction
• Analytics — Advanced reporting and analytics for call volumes, response times, and case outcomes
• All Shelter Features — Full shelter management, volunteer tracking, accounting, task management, and more

Why Animal Control Agencies Choose Pet Friend

• Mobile-first design — Officers can log calls, update cases, and access records from their phones while in the field
• No IT department needed — Cloud-based means no servers to maintain, no software to install
• Government-friendly procurement — Yearly billing with PO and check payment accepted
• Transparent pricing — $100/month flat rate, no per-user fees, no hidden costs
• Okta SSO — Integrate with existing government identity systems

Perfect For

• County and city animal control departments
• Dog warden offices
• Humane law enforcement agencies
• Combined shelter and animal control operations
• Organizations needing officer field reporting

Animal Control Workflows Pet Friend Was Designed Around

Animal control is the part of the shelter world where software most often fails. Most shelter management systems were built for intake clerks and veterinarians, not for officers driving a truck responding to a neighbor-complaint call at 10pm. Shelter software is built around animals you have taken in — animal control spends most of its day on animals it hasn't. Pet Friend's Shelter Plus plan was built for the workflows officers actually run.

Your ordinances, entered once

Ask three officers what the fine is for a dog at large and you'll often get three answers — and that inconsistency is what gets citations reduced. Pet Friend gives you an ordinance library: each local ordinance recorded once with its municipal code, the plain-language description the offender reads, a pre-set fine, and the standard verbiage your agency always uses. From then on, writing a citation is selection rather than composition.

Retiring an ordinance or changing its fine next budget year never rewrites history — each citation keeps its own copy of exactly what it was issued under.

Citations that carry every violation

One call frequently produces several violations — at large, unlicensed, and a lapsed rabies vaccination. Add as many ordinances as apply to a single citation, each with its own fine and its own wording that the officer can adjust for that specific call, and the total adds itself up. Offender details are recorded properly (first, middle and last name, address, driver's licence, email and mobile), along with the address of the offense, which is often not where the offender lives. Warning and fine are separate checkboxes, so a warning notice reads as a warning.

Signatures and receipts from the roadside

Officers routinely leave without an acknowledgment: nobody's home, or the owner won't sign a carbon copy. From any citation — straight from the list, without opening the record — Pet Friend can send the notice by email or text, or the officer hands over their own device to sign on the spot. The notice is built automatically from the citation: every ordinance, its description, your wording, each fine, and the total due, so the signature acknowledges something specific.

When they sign, they're sent a receipt with a link to download their signed copy, and staff can resend it any time. You can also text or email them the fine itself — a secure payment link they open on their own phone and pay through your Stripe, Square or PayPal account, no account needed at their end — and the same link becomes their receipt once it clears. When the fine is marked paid, they're sent a payment receipt itemized by ordinance. A large share of unpaid fines aren't refusals — they're people who never absorbed the deadline, and this is the cheapest fix for that. Victims and callers can sign bite reports and service-call reports the same way.

Calls, cases, bites and citations that know about each other

Dispatch logs the call with location, caller contact, type, and the assigned officer, and the officer can update it from a phone in the field. When a call turns serious, Create Case opens a case prefilled from that call and links the two automatically — no retyping the address. From the case you can issue a citation, log another call, or start a bite report that all arrive already linked back to it, and every record lists what's attached to it in both directions. Each case carries a permanent Case # you can search and link by, plus your agency's own internal case number so your existing filing system still works.

Cases hold evidence: photographs, video, and documents attached to the record, with a printable case report for the file.

Bite and quarantine investigations

Pet Friend records the victim, the animal, the rabies status, and the location of the incident as its own field — separate from the victim's home address, which is what makes bite-location reporting to your health department possible at all. The quarantine end date is calculated from the date of the bite, not the date the report was filed.

Critically, the biting animal doesn't have to be in your system. Most never are. The officer can pick one of your animals or simply describe it — species, breed, and colour — as real, reportable data instead of a note in a text box.

Citations, fines, and the numbers you defend a budget with

Fines are tracked from issue to payment, and the reports are available continuously rather than reconstructed at budget time: citations by ordinance (which violations you're really writing), unpaid fines with days overdue for your city attorney's collections list, activity per officer covering calls, citations and fines, and bite investigation volume with quarantine status.

Mileage, vehicles, and equipment

Officers need reimbursement-grade mileage logs, vehicle assignments, and equipment records. Pet Friend handles these in the officer module so your fleet coordinator isn't chasing paper logs at month-end.

See it screen by screen

We wrote a screenshot-by-screenshot tour of the animal control module — the ordinance library, a citation carrying three ordinances, the signature request, linked cases, and the reports. There's also a field guide to writing citations that hold up.

Try Shelter Plus Demo Request Quote