Of all the ill conceived laws proposed by animal rights activists in recent years, SB 1578 by Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) is possibly the worst.
The proposed measure, poised to clear the Legislature this week, would ban the tethering of dogs for more than three hours in any 24-hour period.
That’s right. This would make it impossible for anyone who works an eight-hour day to leave a dog tied to its own dog house or a shade tree. Even one day a month when, let’s say, the power company is scheduled to read the meter.
Let’s get real here. Occasionally restraining a dog for its own safety or that of tradespeople doing their jobs is not animal abuse by any stretch of the imagination.
Keeping a Great Dane in a tiny apartment all day or in a small chain link kennel on a cement floor is far worse, yet apparently more humane to some.
There are already laws against animal abuse that often go unenforced because they’re difficult to interpret and animal control offices are understaffed. What constitutes abuse is, after all, a subjective decision. If a neighbor complains that a dog is tied up all day without water or shade, that’s pretty much a slam dunk. But three hours total, even in one-hour or half-hour increments, is unduly stringent.
Support is coming mostly from urban areas while farmers, ranchers, hunters and rural residents oppose the rigidity of the bill. Penalties are odious. Owners may be arrested and fined, and criminal charges filed carrying a $1,000 fine and a six-month prison sentence. This, in a state that can’t find cells for half its violent offenders. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a dog owner, so far hasn’t weighed in on this one, although his advisors have given him plenty of reasons to oppose it.
Many California cities and subdivisions in unincorporated areas already have strict laws regulating dogs and other pets; the number a family can keep, the size, type and placement of fencing allowed. Yet, animal rights activists, some with the best intentions, insist on legislating behavior in ways that are virtually unenforceable, often with unintended consequences.
Both of my daughters have worked in veterinary offices where activists regularly brought in “rescued” dogs (and everything from squirrels to pigeons), saying they would try to find homes for them. They rarely did. The vet was stuck with them and they had to live in cages. My daughters often wound up rescuing them from the rescuers. One lovely dog had been kept at the vet’s office for more than a year; the only time he saw the sun was when she took him out for a walk on her lunch hour. Eventually, she got him a home with a trainer who placed him in several movies. The dog was in heaven; the activist who dumped him would loudly decry his work in the entertainment business as cruel. Go figure.
Recently, my other daughter kept a friend’s dog with us for a week to prep it for work with children in a feature film in Montana. It came with a huge portable kennel, a comfortable collar and a long, lightweight chain. We placed the kennel just inside the playroom, leaving the door open, the coolest spot available. The chain was long enough to allow the dog to go out on the deck, get a drink of water, and even climb up on the chaise for a snooze. Posh digs, I’d say, but illegal under SB 1578.
Rescued dogs are often confirmed escapees and we’ve had our share. We have a half-acre yard in front of the house with shade trees, water, a cool place to hang. But the Border collie jumps easily over the five-foot chain link fence and the pointer digs underneath the gates. An insurmountable problem if occasional tethering were banned.
Last year, my son agreed to keep three cattle dogs for his friend who was moving. We had no room for them in the fenced yards or two small kennels at the ranch house. So the dogs were put on long chains in a large grove of cottonwood trees near the barn. They could see everything but they were safe and not in conflict with our dogs. It would be a shame if some idiotic law criminalized my son for helping out his friend, who came to play with the dogs every weekend until he found a new home.
During my years training horses, we raised Queensland heelers, cattle dogs that were easy to train but difficult to keep from heeling every animal that moved. It’s a breed thing, like the Border collie that herds chickens and cats. It was their nature to race around the arena chasing the horses’ feet; a hazard to dog, horse and rider. So the puppies were tied in an elevated booth (the doggie skybox) at the end of the ring where they could watch the horses without fixating on their moving feet. A strategy that kept the dogs from developing a dangerous habit would have, under Lowenthal’s bill, landed me in jail.
If this bill does pass the Legislature, I hope the governor will have the good sense to veto it. In this love-me-love-my-dog world, it’s wise to be a considerate neighbor by controlling your animals and, at the same time, keeping them safe and happy. If this requires some tethering, then so be it. Let’s not criminalize what is basically humane behavior.