Oswego County legislators are scheduled to vote Thursday night on a plan to create an online registry of people convicted of animal abuse. The idea is to allow businesses or people selling or giving away animals to be able to check the registry to ensure that a known animal abuser isn’t getting the animal.
Fewer than half of New York’s counties have such registries, according to the online listing of registries at the New York State Humane Association’s website. The only one known to be operating in central New York is Onondaga County’s. It is maintained by the Sheriff’s Department and is a hard-to-use, lengthy listing of more than 100 convicted abusers not in alphabetical order. Cayuga County legislators approved creating a registry at the end of 2025 but it is not online yet.
Interest in an online registry spiked in Oswego County last month, after police charged a Sandy Creek man with a misdemeanor count under state Agriculture and Markets law. Animal welfare volunteers arrived shortly after police at the home of Jeffrey Zehr and helped place more than 150 animals in temporary custody with various foster care families and businesses. Discussion of a registry had already begun before the incident.
Oswego County District Attorney Anthony DiMartino worked with legislators to shape the final proposal. “I have absolutely no objection to this registry,” he said. “I believe it's been long coming.”
“They can be a tool that's used by rescues and shelters to make sure they're not giving animals to people that shouldn't have them,” said Oswego County SPCA head Tanya Semchenko, who led the effort to find new homes for the animals taken from the Zehr farm. “I think that they could be used by law enforcement. If they go somewhere and somebody has an animal that they should not have, hopefully, it would give them grounds to remove said animal.”
However, support for county registries in general is lukewarm, for several reasons: Not all counties have registries; abusers often get their animals from private citizens getting rid of an unwanted pet and those citizens are unlikely to even know about the registry; an abuser’s registration doesn’t move with them from county to county.
Zehr had been convicted of animal abuse in 2019 in Jefferson County, which does not maintain an abuser registry, and moved to Sandy Creek after that.
The Humane Society of New York State is one of many animal welfare organizations that support creation of a statewide registry.
“This patchwork system that's currently in place in New York State is really not helping as much as we would hope it would,” said Diane Fingar, vice president of the society. “So we have to have a statewide registry.”
Bills to create a registry are moving through committees at the state Senate and Assembly.
At the same time, animal advocates want stronger punishment for abuse and bans on owning animals. Nearly all abuse cases are misdemeanors and are rarely punished with jail time, regardless of how egregious the abuse is. DiMartino would also like to see repeat cases handled as DWI cases are now handled – with harsher punishment for repeat violation.
