http://www.petconnection.com/blog/2008/02/26/reflections-on-the-los-angeles-pet-sterilization-law/

Reflections on the Los Angeles pet sterilization law

By Christie Keith

February 26, 2008

This is how stupid it gets.

A law signed into effect today in Los Angeles requires that all pet dogs and cats be surgically sterilized. Why? So Los Angeles can become no-kill, of course.

And they make it sound like a very reasonable concept, exempting, they say, animals in competition (show dogs, for instance, although the dogs would have to be being shown by the age of 4 months, and you can’t show a dog until he’s 6 months old, but hey — it makes a nice sound bite) and dogs being used as guide dogs or police dogs, although the actual way that works would eliminate the breeding stock from which many of those dogs come.

But then we get the one that makes my head explode: It exempts “professional breeders.”

That’s right, it exempts not the small, home-based hobby breeders we all mean when we discuss “responsible breeders,” those who by and large are trying to preserve and improve their chosen breeds, and who provide a lifetime safety net for their puppies and kittens.

No, it’s exempting, as did a proposed statewide bill before it, the very factory-farm-modeled puppy breeding facilities that do no genetic testing, no temperament screening, no screening of potential owners, and provide zero in the way of a backup plan if the dog doesn’t work out in the home. Increasing the chances that dog will end up in the shelter.

Which is exactly, of course, what this type of legislation is supposed to avoid. Even though it never once has anywhere it’s been tried, and the programs and policies that do work have never involved the forced sterilization of family pets.

Does anyone ever wonder why it is that a failed model is being flogged so mercilessly as the answer to shelter deaths? Could it possibly be because these laws aren’t being proposed despite the way they virtually eliminate the small-scale breeding and showing of dogs but because of it?

They say to never attribute to malice that which can more accurately attributed to stupidity, and I’m sure that vast majority of people who support this type of legislation honestly believe it will accomplish its goal, despite the fact, as I said, that it never has. So for them, not stupidity, but ignorance and a lack of awareness of the facts.

But the people who promote it? That one’s malice. How else to explain them going after the powerless, mostly-keeping-their-heads-down hobby breeders, instead of the big, powerful, lobbied-up, USDA-licensed, government-approved, big business puppy farmers? I mean, it’s not the agility lobby or the Scottish Deerhound lobby or the huge machine behind the mass-production of guide dogs for the blind they have to worry about, is it? Because you can crush those people pretty easily, and get a win in your column, even though you won’t save the life of a single shelter dog by doing so.

Of course, I’ve come to realize you won’t save shelter animal’s lives by stamping out puppy mills, either, even though I still oppose them on other grounds. There’s no evidence people who get their dogs at pet stores give them up to shelters any more easily than people who get their dogs from a neighbor or a newspaper ad or, for that matter, the shelter in the first place.

You’ll only save shelter animal’s lives by reforming the animal control and shelter management system in this country. And the huge gaping divide that’s grown up between the people who want to move forward by doing what they’ve always done only harder, and those who want to abandon a broken system, is a sign that the moment to do that is really here.

What Los Angeles has done is not something new, brave, and bold, nor is it salvation. It’s a step back, a diversion of resources in exactly the direction that will do nothing to stop the flow of dogs and cats in body bags out the back doors of the shelters of Los Angeles. Nor will it ease that flow if it’s adopted statewide.

Calling this a step towards “no kill,” as L.A. Councilman Tony Cardenas did in a press conference today, is the worst kind of propagandizing, because it co-opts a goal everyone desires — ending the use of killing as a tool of animal population control — and attaches it to a system that has never once reached that goal, while turning its back on the only systems that ever have