During the month of September the United States Service Dog Registry invited everyone to write in with their suggestions about how they would like to see the the registry improved. And we had an amazing response—bigger than we had anticipated! We want to warmly thank all of you who wrote in with your suggestions (and many compliments)! We’re still going through all of our e-mails, categorizing suggestions and tabulating votes for specific things. We also want to remind everyone that not all of your suggestions will be able to be included either because of cost issues or because they will compromise privacy. But we do have a few exciting things that we are ready to say will be officially included in the next update:

The United States Service Dog Registry (Version 2.0)

Profile Pages By far, most people writing in wanted to be able to do more with their profile pages. They wanted to be able to include links to their social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and their blogs. So the biggest improvement we are planning for the Registry is a complete revamping of everyone’s profile page. We will allow the option to link to all of your social networking sites and blogs directly from your profile page. We will also be making it easier for everyone to link back to your United States Service Dog Registry profile page from other social networking sites.

Name Change It seems most people refer to their dogs as Service Dogs, some people refer to them as Assistance Dogs or Assistance Animals, and yet another smaller group of people prefer to call them by what disability they help with (ie. Hearing Dog, Guide Dog, Epilepsy Dog, etc). While we won’t be changing the name of the registry at this point, we have decided to start using the term “Assistance Animal” because it is more inclusive. We will have a new tagline on all of our materials where it will fit, “United States Service Dog Registry, Assistance Animal Registration Service.”

Memorial Pages We’ve had quite a few requests to create Memorial Pages for Assistance Animals who have passed on. Therefore we will be allowing users to “deactivate” the working status of their dog and retire it’s 10 digit ID, which will be yours forever.  Your dog’s profile page will remain up as a memorial, and we will include a place for you to include a short epitaph in memory of him or her.  If you have a new Assistance Animal, we will also allow the option for you to link to your previous animal’s memorial profile page.

These are only a few of the improvements we will be making to the Registry. As we move further into our programming stage we will be able to announce more. And of course, the registry will still be free as always — including every improvement we will make. Again, thank you for your responses and we look forward to working hard on making this Registry better for all who need it!