A modestly proposed alternative to mandatory spay/neuter
Christie Keith at PetConnection.com has some good thoughts about an alternative to L.A. mandatory spay-neutering ordinance:
…the city of Los Angeles decided to mandate the spaying and neutering of puppies and kittens prior to the age of four months in order to reduce pet population numbers.
Way to go, LA! Let’s do something that has never once worked to lower rates of shelter killings instead of doing the things that have worked in urban, rural, northern, southern, rich, and poor communities all over the country. Like Gina said: yet another reason I’m glad I don’t live in LA.
I was reading all the ranting about this on the various dog and pet law lists I’m on, and it struck me that the number one and number two reasons people surrender their dogs to shelters are landlord and other housing problems. For cats, housing difficulties are the first, third, and fifth most common reasons for surrender. So I’ve come up with an idea that I’d like to float, a sort of modest proposal to reduce the number of animals in shelters.
What if, instead of passing laws telling me what to do with the reproductive organs of my own dogs and cats, we passed laws telling landlords what they can do with their houses and apartment buildings, and prohibiting rental, condo, and housing association policies that ban pets?
Is it really any more of an intrusion into private property rights and individual liberties to require a building owner to allow someone to have a few cats or dogs — whose potential to damage his property, while real, is still reversible — than to require a pet owner to have surgery done on a puppy or kitten at a dangerously young age? A surgery that is most certainly not reversible, as its effects are not. Not to mention that dogs and cats are living creatures with an irreplaceable genetic heritage and buildings are, last I checked, not.
Just read the horrifying stories about pets losing their homes due to the sub-prime mortgage mess, and then tell me which will save more animals from dying in shelters, or ending up there in the first place: Some unenforceable mandatory spay/neuter law that has never once, anywhere it was implemented, achieved its stated goal, or a simple law prohibiting landlords from banning pets?
Think it won’t fly? You’re probably right. In fact, I’m pretty sure no one would even dare suggest it, although it would do far more to get animals out of shelters and send fewer of them there in the first place than any s/n law ever could. But this is America, baby, and money is all that talks.
So let me revise my proposal to something that not only has been proven to work, but costs less than the status quo and saves animal lives: implementing the policies and programs of the No-Kill Equation.
Either that, or get ready to see some incredibly pissed off landlords when I find a tenants’ rights lawyer to draft my new mandatory pet inclusion legislation.
Meanwhile, controversy continues to swirl around the way the ordinance has been rushed through and virtually rubber-stamped into existance, with very little notice to opponents. There's also a lot of commentary about the whopper lies told at the meeting by the proponents of the proposal. What a shame that this is what passes for government these days.
