A new law in Spanish Fork allowed the Fentons, who own two more dogs than the city pet limit, to have four dogs with the purchase of a residential kennel license.

The license is $25 per year, much less than the $1,200 fine the Fentons were going to have to pay for going over the allowed pet limit.

When the problem was presented to the city, Spanish Fork Mayor Joe Thomas asked the city attorney and animal control officer Mark Byers to work with concerned residents to draft a new law.

“The new ordinance just basically allows you to have four dogs,” Byers said.

If you have more than two, you have to have a kennel permit and two of those dogs have to be spayed or neutered.

The law also pertains to cats.

Spanish Fork resident Rick Evans helped the city write the new law after discovering he couldn’t get companions for his older dogs.

“We did that under the notion of trying to encourage responsible pet ownership. Hopefully that was a theme we reiterated through the whole process, was that having animals comes with responsibility,” Evans said. The law addresses several concerns about public defecation and loose animals.

“We believe those should be enforced, we were just trying to call attention to the fact that an irresponsible owner with one dog causes more trouble than a responsible owner with four,” Evans said.

Spanish Fork’s two pet limit is similar to its neighbors. Springville, Santaquin, Payson and Mapleton all have a two-dog limit. Salem has a three-pet limit.

However, those numbers could change soon.

“We’re rewriting our ordinance right now to allow for a different type of kennel license,” Mapleton Police Chief Dean Pettersson said.

Like Spanish Fork, the city is creating residential kennel permits for owners with more than two dogs.

“We have a couple people in town that have more than two dogs that were concerned about it,” Pettersson said. “It’s just to help people that want to have three dogs or four dogs.”

Pettersson did not know when the law would take effect in Mapleton.

On the other side, Payson police say that their law has been an issue in a different way. It allows residents to have up to two dogs and two cats.

“There’s actually been more people that want it less than two than more than two,” Paula Thompson, Payson police clerk, said.

The numbers game was the main concern for Evans, who wanted to focus more on responsible pet owners, especially because he said a concern for city staff was the possibility of animal complaints.

Byers said that having multiple pets does increase the probability that one could bark or cause problems — two dogs make barking twice as likely as one dog.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of homes going up in Spanish Fork right now, and every one of those, under the new ordinance could have two dogs,” Evans said, noting that he wasn’t advocating that every home get a dog, but that every pet owner be responsible, no matter the number of pets they own.

Natalie Evans is available at 344-2561 or nevans@heraldextra.com.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.