(Cue Sarah McLachlan – promoted by Colorado Pols)
from the Denver Post
Rep. Beth McCann, D-Denver, said animals have been crippled in cages, injured and killed by people who raise them for mass marketing.
Her bill, introduced Wednesday, would prevent dog breeders from keeping more than 25 adult breeding dogs.
…
The Humane Society said one Colorado dog breeder was ordered out of business last year after state inspectors found 40 animals had starved to death on the property and six others were in critical condition.
Kudos to Representative McCann for stepping up to end a practice that is repugnant. Exactly how the bill should work will of course be discussed. But closing down the puppy mills that treat the puppies horribly – this needs to happen
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Requiring dog breeders to meet particular requirements so as to be non-abusive makes sense. But, it certainly isn’t obvious that bigger operations are consistently worse than smaller ones.
Indeed, in most industries, bigger operations are easier to regulate than small ones, because they can’t easily escape regulatory notice, and because they generate enough profits to give the owner an incentive to operate legally so that the profit stream can continue to flow.
Is it a problem to have 25 adult breading dogs and a hundred puppies on 1/15th of an acre (about one city lot) in a one person operation? Sure. And, most municipalities in Colorado would prohibit that under local zoning and licensing laws in any case.
But, if a breeder trained as a vet tech has a 5,000 acre ranch (not uncommon in Colorado), and also has ranch hands who are responsible for cattle, building maintenance, and the dogs, etc., who is to say that more than 25 adult breeding dogs and a hundred puppies is so problematic?
Is it really worse to have 125 dogs on a ranch than it is to have several hundred head of cattle, or thousands of chickens, or dozens of pigs?
I think what’s important is to have them start discussing how they should stop these problems. A small breeder can be bad while a large one can be good.
I do worry though that the larger ones are more prone to generating lots of puppies and then putting down the excess. We got 2 of our goldens from breeders – but in each case they had 2 females and clearly were placing every pup they had.
Our legislators at work.
Four or five breeders are caught abusing dogs and the General Assembly wastes its time writing new laws. The folks were caught and put out of business.
The rest of the industry carries on.
Why don’t the legislators have the good sense to focus on the budget and forget the nonsense?
Because they don’t understand budgets.
And one of their kids has a dog.
Why 25?
Aren’t the current animal abuse laws sufficient? Do they need some tweaking?
I’m a fan of registraton in leiu of licensing in a number of fields. This could be one. If you have two females breeding or more, you register with the state. To advertise or sell to the big stores, you must be registered.
Enforcement of humane conditions could be funded by registration fees, kept modest to encourage registration.
This is what should have been with mortgage brokers, too.
in view of this: ” state inspectors found 40 animals had starved to death on the property and six others were in critical condition”
But I don’t know if this is the right law. Perhaps there should be random inspections paid for by the industry.
the problem is not the size as pointed out above, but the mistreatment of the animals and conditions. Random unannounced inspections seems a lot more effective for this type of situation.
Later in the session, can we expect a law to require diets that work and effective 5-minute workouts?
..that commercial with Sarah always reduces me to tears and makes me want to assign my lottery winnings to the ASPCA.
when they pry them from my cold dead hand.