Cape Town wants a permit for every dog and cat. The question is what problem that solves.
The City of Cape Town has published a draft Animal Keeping By-law that requires a permit for every dog and every cat older than 6 months, and public comment closes on 29 September 2026. The argument since publication has been about whether this amounts to a pet licence, with the City saying it has no intention of charging anyone and the wording of the document saying something broader. Underneath that argument sit several powers that have drawn almost no attention, including an arrest power, a power to list breeds as dangerous, and a rule that would slowly end the cart horse trade. This article asks what problem the by-law was written to solve, and how much of it actually answers that problem.
The document, and what it is
The City published the draft Animal Keeping By-law, 2026 on 28 August and opened it for public comment until 29 September. It runs to 46 sections and covers dogs, cats, dangerous animals, working horses, security dogs, stray animals, pet businesses, livestock, poultry, birds, rabbits, bees and wild animals.
The public argument has been fierce. On one side, an online petition and a wave of coverage saying the City wants a fee on every animal, wants to cap how many pets people may keep, wants neighbours to approve applications, and wants officers who can search property without a warrant, with 2 years imprisonment behind it.
On the other side, Mayoral Committee Member for Safety and Security JP Smith, who has said there is absolutely no intention to introduce a dog licence, that critics are quoting sections out of context, and that the controversy is being driven by people with an interest in the 4 November local government elections.
Both sides have spent 2 weeks arguing about what is in the document. Very little of that argument has asked why the document exists.
What the City says the problem is
The City has answered that question in its own media release.
Smith said that acting on an animal or simply removing one can be a lengthy process, that the City is limited in when and how it can act, and that the changes aim to extend its reach and strengthen its enforcement.
That is not a statement that people are keeping too many animals, or that the existing rules are wrong. It is a statement that the City cannot act quickly enough. The problem the by-law is built to solve is an enforcement problem, on the City’s own account.
The City has also published what that enforcement workload looks like. Its Animal Control Unit took 9 499 calls in the last financial year. Of those, 4 431 were about stray dogs and 2 839 were about dangerous or vicious dogs. Together those 2 categories account for more than 76% of everything the unit handled. Cruelty, neglect and injury to animals came to 325 calls, or roughly 3%.
Stray dogs and dangerous dogs are the workload. That is the measure against which the rest of the document has to be judged.
The parts that answer the problem
A good deal of the draft does answer it, and says so plainly.
Sections 2 and 3 require every dog and cat to wear a collar and tag, or to be microchipped, with the chip registered in the owner’s name together with a telephone number and physical address. Section 22 requires the pound to scan every animal brought into it. Section 18 requires anyone who rescues a stray to report it within 24 hours and to have it scanned, and where an animal has no chip, a notice must go up on the City’s Petfinder site to trace the owner.
That is a direct and proportionate answer to 4 431 stray dog calls. A chipped animal goes home. An unchipped animal sits in a pound and is eventually rehomed or destroyed.
Section 5 requires dogs and cats over 6 months to be sterilised unless the owner holds a permit to keep the animal unsterilised. Whatever else is said about it, sterilisation addresses the stray problem before the animals exist rather than after they are picked up.
Section 25 requires a permit, signage and muzzling for dangerous animals, which answers the other 2 839 calls.
Then there are the welfare provisions. Section 14 prohibits working an animal in temperatures above 30 degrees and requires a rest break at least once every hour with access to clean drinking water. Section 15 prohibits a working horse from pulling a load heavier than double its own weight, including the weight of the cart. Section 13 bans adhesive and glue traps, including their sale, and prohibits leaving an animal in a stationary vehicle in conditions that would harm it. Section 11 bans wild and exotic animals in circus acts.
The Cape of Good Hope SPCA has welcomed these provisions, and it is right to. They cost the public nothing and they answer real cruelty that its inspectors deal with.
The permit, and where the wording sits against the explanation
Section 2, subsection 5 says a person who keeps a dog older than 6 months must apply to the City for a permit in respect of every dog. Subsection 6 says the application must be accompanied by the prescribed permit fee as set out in the City’s tariff of charges, together with a valid rabies inoculation certificate. Section 3 says the same for every cat.
Smith has said the permit is aimed at people keeping unsterilised animals for breeding. Sterilisation is dealt with in section 5, which is a separate clause with its own separate permit for keeping an animal unsterilised. Section 2 subsection 5 refers to every dog, without qualification. Smith has asked the portfolio committee to amend the wording.
Amending that word would not touch the more durable point. The by-law contains no figure. It refers to the prescribed fee in the City’s tariff of charges, which is a budget document reviewed every year. The by-law creates the power to charge. The budget sets the price.
Smith also volunteered something that deserves attention. He said the City had previously considered a conventional dog licensing system as a source of revenue for animal welfare organisations, and rejected it, because municipalities have found that collecting the fees can cost more than the fees bring in.
The objection, on that account, was administrative rather than principled. And this draft installs precisely the machinery that answers an administrative objection: compulsory microchips registered to an owner’s name and address, a rabies certificate for each animal, an application for each animal, and a defined “contracted entity”, a non-profit organisation the City may contract to carry out inspection, permitting and administrative functions on its behalf.
Two further gaps matter here. There is no transitional provision anywhere in the document, and section 46, headed short title and commencement, gives only the short title. And nowhere do sections 2 or 3 say whether the permit is once off or renewed annually, although section 38 goes out of its way to record that a beekeeping permit is renewable. A licence, in ordinary use, is a fee that recurs. The draft is silent on the one feature that would settle the question.
Section 24 adds that the City may charge a fee for considering an application and a fee for granting it.
The powers that have drawn little attention
Section 40, subsection 1, paragraph d allows an authorised official to arrest a person who commits an offence under the by-law, using the arrest powers in section 40 of the Criminal Procedure Act, and to search that person afterwards under section 23 of the same Act. An authorised official includes a Metropolitan Police officer, a traffic officer, a law enforcement officer who is a peace officer, and a member of the SAPS.
The public argument has centred on section 42 and searches. Section 40 is the arrest power, and read with section 2 it applies to an unpermitted dog.
Section 25, subsection 1 says the City may, from time to time, list categories of dangerous animals or breeds. That is the whole clause. It sets no criteria, no procedure, no requirement for a council resolution or public comment, and no appeal against a listing. Once a breed is listed, its owners require a permit, must display signage, and must muzzle the animal in public.
The definition in section 1 widens this further. A dangerous animal is any animal that poses a reasonable or potential threat to the safety of any person, animal or property, or that has attacked a person or animal with or without provocation, or that has damaged property. An animal need not be on any list to fall inside section 25. It needs to have damaged something.
Section 5, subsection 4 allows an authorised official to cause an animal to be sterilised and to recover the cost from the owner, where the official deems it necessary. The listed grounds include the welfare of the animal, preventing a nuisance, a stray animal, a request by the owner, and following a seizure.
Section 29 provides that any animal found on premises is presumed to be the property of the owner or occupier unless the contrary is proven. Section 39 provides that a contravention of any provision of the by-law carries a fine, or imprisonment for up to 2 years, or both.
The clause that closes a trade
Section 15, subsection 5 requires that an application for a permit for a working horse provide documentary evidence that the horse is the foal of a working mare.
That is a hereditary condition on a licence. A new horse cannot lawfully enter cart work unless its mother was already a working horse, and most owners hold no such documentation.
There may be a sound animal welfare argument for reducing the number of working horses in the city. The point is that this change appears inside a documentation sub-clause, applies to people in areas where public participation is thinnest, and features in none of the City’s public messaging about the by-law.
Why a permit nobody can enforce still matters
A unit handling 9 499 calls a year is dealing with about 26 calls a day. It will not permit every dog in a city of nearly 5 million people.
That does not make section 2 subsection 5 harmless. It makes it selective. An offence that almost everyone technically commits, and that can only be enforced occasionally, becomes an additional charge available when an official is on a property for another reason. This requires no bad faith from anyone at the City. It is the same pattern as an expired vehicle licence disc.
The case for the City
The strongest argument against alarm is that most of the animal limits already existed in the 2021 by-law. Cape Town has lived with those caps for years without mass seizures of pets, which is real evidence of how the City actually behaves. Municipal drafters also routinely draft wide and narrow the application later through policy and standard operating procedures. And Smith’s account of the licensing cost analysis is evidence against a revenue motive, offered without being asked for.
The answer to that is narrow but firm. The limits carried over. What is new is the arrest power, sterilisation at the owner’s expense, the breed listing power, the presumption of ownership and a permit tied to a tariff. Continuity in the rules is not continuity in the enforcement regime.
What this actually amounts to
For a household in Durbanville with 2 dogs, this is close to an administrative inconvenience. Microchip the animals, complete a form, carry on.
For a cart horse owner in Philippi, for the owner of a dog on a future breed list, for a family holding a slaughter at home, or for a person living on the street with a dog, section 11 of the draft prohibits using an animal to solicit money in a public place, and the same document is a permit regime with an arrest power attached.
A by-law that is an inconvenience in the suburbs and a serious constraint in the townships is not a neutral by-law, whatever the intentions behind it.
How to comment
Public comment closes on 29 September 2026.
Submissions may be sent to animal.bylaw@capetown.gov.za, made online through the City’s website, or delivered in writing to Llewellyn Grove, Law Enforcement Department, City of Cape Town, 1st Floor, Omniforum Building, 94 Van Riebeeck Street, Kuils River, 7590.
A submission does not have to reject the document. The strongest one supports the microchipping, the working animal protections and the bans on glue traps and circus animals, and then asks the specific questions. Is the permit once off or annual. Where is the transitional provision. What criteria govern the listing of a breed. And why must a working horse be the foal of a working mare.
This article reflects my own reading of the draft by-law. Every section number is given so that it can be checked. Where a qualified reader can show that I have read a clause wrongly, I will correct it.
