Lexington, KY Animal Ordinances: Microchipping (2026)

Section 4-14(h) directs the urban county animal control officer to maintain a photographic registry of every dog in Lexington-Fayette County that a court has declared vicious, recording the owner's legal name, date of birth and permanent address, every address where the dog is kept, its vaccination history, and its microchip identification information. Section 4-14(i) then gives the owner thirty days from the declaration to have the dog spayed or neutered and to present it to animal control so it can be tagged with a microchip identifier, if it is not already tagged, and entered into that registry.

If any of the registry information later becomes inaccurate, the owner must notify animal control within ten days with corrected information, and the officer may demand reasonable verification. Animal control may charge a reasonable fee for the spaying, neutering and microchip tagging performed under this subsection. Because the requirement is tied to a court's vicious-dog finding rather than to routine licensing, an ordinary pet owner in Lexington-Fayette has no chip mandate under this section unless their dog has been through that court process. The same section separately lets an animal control officer take temporary possession of a dog on probable cause that it bit a person or animal without provocation, holding it at the LFUCG shelter at ten dollars per day in boarding charges while the vicious-dog case is pending, which is often how a dog first enters the microchip and registry pipeline.