On pets, pooper scooper laws, strays and other animal related problems.

Found this at www.americanthinker.com:

The End of Family Pets?
By Jack Curtis
Dogs and cats joined us as symbiotes a long time back; we made most of them dependent pets and now that they can't survive on their own. Now we're throwing them under the bus. The termination is the -- probably -- unintended result of SPCA, PETA, innumerable tender-hearted or at least vote-hungry elected city and county officials and decades of anthropomorphized Disney creatures but it's no less terminal for that. We're eliminating these critters in order to save them. It isn't that we love our pets less; rather that we love Gaia more. And she doesn't poop inconveniently.

This ending has been sneaking up on us for a while. On the farm, dogs and cats had only to please -- or at least, not annoy -- the farmer. Once they started turning up in cities, that changed. Dog bites, rabies, barking, and poop annoyed besides mail carriers, increasing numbers of voters; politicians took notice. How cats were unlucky enough to be sucked in is less obvious but they were; possibly another case of the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe it was the songbirds.

First, licenses were required, with fees to pay for city animal services. A bureaucracy appeared in local governments and various volunteer groups were formed, all increasing the available money and political interest in pets. As city dwellers grew wealthier, veterinary practitioners added pets to their formerly mostly farm practices and joined the growing cadre of lobbyists.

The licenses were the first sign that pets were no longer private business. Euthanasia of strays came too. Government regulation of dog and cat fertility clarified who was in charge for any doubters; spay and neuter laws proliferated. Declining numbers of farms didn't care anymore; increasing numbers of city folk did. To please them, places like New York City mandated the famous Pooper Scoopers along with leash laws. Computer technology brought the embedded chip to replace the metal license tag that once jingled on dog collars.

That covers a lot that's happened to pets fairly quickly. At one time, a schoolboy might have been accompanied by his dog anywhere but school; it was expected. No one expected a leash; the dog ran free, always keeping his boy as the center of his explorations. He wasn't neutered, though females, less common, were often spayed after a litter or two. That, please note, was in residential neighborhoods, not only farms. Today, things have changed. Those changes affect more than dogs; young boys' unsupervised wanderings for hours at a time, usual then, are pretty scarce among today's kids, let alone the dogs.

In recent years, those paying attention can see a trend: Society's room for pets has been shrinking, with government enforcing the shrinkage. After licensing, with the dogcatcher, euthanasia and sterilization in place, laws were added forbidding tying a dog in a yard. In Albuquerque, an annual $150 permit is required for that and a trolley must be provided. A litter requires a permit too, for another $150 and there's a cap. Public parks now provide fenced exercise yards for dogs, the only places they are allowed to be unleashed in public.

The future is coming clear in two new laws: In Albuquerque, it's now unlawful to leave a dog alone for very long. The cost of maintaining a dog is moving toward parity with that of maintaining a kid; not only with needing dog-sitters but with health care; health insurance for dogs and cats is a growing market. A recent vet's bill for diagnosing and euthanizing an elderly pooch, a two-hour office visit mostly spent waiting, was $300.

The second and most unmistakable signal is laws popping up around the country simply banning the retail sale of dogs and cats. Examples are Austin, Texas, and West Hollywood, California. The San Francisco city fathers have been considering a similar ban, so has the state of New Jersey and the City of El Paso. Some of these include small animals and birds in the ban.

Most of this has been a response to lobbying from animal welfare folk whose stated concerns center on the miseries of abused, abandoned and inadequately cared-for pets plus protection of the earth from feral cat fecundity; the irony of saving the pets by legislating them out of their habitat doesn't seem to be recognized.

Our pets won't go extinct; cats will take care of themselves and dogs will continue as pets for those who can afford them and as workers where their work is economically justified. But it seems clear that middle-class family pets are following the stay-at-home mom to the museum and if you think about it, for similar reasons. From a quick look at things, kids might be next...

(End of story, my comments follow.)

Sometimes stories come out of that prove we who hold traditional values are as likely as lefty loons to start shouting without thinking about nonexistent problems. This is one of those stories.

Pooper Scooper Laws? Blame the owners who felt free to let "Fido" take a colossal dump wherever he wanted and then walked away from it. In NYC especially it was a massive problem.

Leash laws? FWIW, as a child in a New York suburb I lived in a house on a corner lot. ALL THE DOGS of the neighborhood seemed to like congregating there to do their "duty", especially after night fell. My old man got so sick of it he purchased an air rifle and started shooting the mutts in the ass whenever they showed up. Took care of the problem, pissed off a lot of dog owners too. But they weren't dealing with kids who had played in a yard and came in after inadvertently rolling in dogshit.

Neuter laws? It used to be common to take an unwanted litter of cats or dogs, put 'em in a burlap sack with some bricks and heave the sack into a nearby stream. Either that or just put the litter in a cardboard box and dump it in the middle of a residential street. Nowadays, not so much of that goes on although in my own little corner of paradise we have a stray cat problem. Periodically they'll be attracted to our house by the two felines we keep indoors. Once the smell of cat piss gets noticeable I'll put out a bowl of antifreeze and a few days later we're back to normal. Is it cruel? Maybe but our local animal control people won't come get the animals and I can't blame 'em either. Have you ever tried catching a feral cat?

Some of it gets extreme, no argument there. My wife's father & stepmother looked at getting a cat from the local CatNazi Shelter. They had to agree (in writing!) to not declaw it, not keep "Kitty" indoors and a few other completely nonsensical items. Noted. They went elsewhere.

There again, some people are so ridiculously ignorant of how to treat animals it's easy to see justification for the laws. In saying that I'm thinking of one acqaintance who kept an oversized Newfoundland dog in a 1300 sq. ft. house. This thing could stand on it's hind legs and look me in the eye, definitely an animal that needed a LOT of room to run in. I always considered it abusive to keep that mutt there, fortunately he eventually wound up on a farm.

Does the government take the regulatory ball and run with it as far as possible? Definitely. But some of those laws & regulations are more the result of thoughtless & inconsiderate fools than any attempt to further enmesh us in a governmental spider web of laws.