For whatever reason, California SB 250 -- the mandatory spay/neuter bill -- is no longer inactive. In fact, the Concerned Dog Owners of California report that an assembly vote could be as early as today.
After years of hosting shot fairs, and in particular, Celebrate Your Pit Bull events, it is painfully clear that what works is community outreach and education. Low-income dog owners do not have access to affordable resources, including vet care, nor do they know where to look. A mandatory spay/neuter law isn't going to make them all of a sudden get their animals altered. And if their dog/cat gets confiscated and lands in the shelter, will they have enough money to pay the fines and the surgery costs to reclaim him? After speaking with numbers of San Francisco pit bull owners about whether they know their city mandates that their dogs get neutered, the owners just respond that they just keep their dogs hidden rather than take them out during the day.
Educating people about responsible pet ownership can't happen through quick-fix legislation and most certainly can't happen overnight. Research has shown that mandatory spay/neuter laws sound great in theory, but are ineffective in practice. And, despite that, there are so many things wrong with the language in this bill that have the potential for negative unintended consequences.
Please, take a minute to call your Assemblymember today and voice your opposition.
9 comments:
Excellent analysis and I'm surprised at the lack of responses to this post. Idealistically, mandatory spay and neutering sounds like the rescuer's dream come true. Looking at the results to dogs and families in those areas that have implemented msn, its not working and is in reality, a nightmare to those of us who are trying to reduce the number of homeless animals.
Lynn in N. Cal
Once people roll up their sleeves, education and outreach is almost always more effective than a government mandate. Look at cigarettes, which have stayed legal but have a worse social stigma than marijuana (probably for good reason)...
"nor do they know where to look."
I'm sure that is really important, and not well-understood by people who are used to dealing with information sources all the time.
We get a fair number of calls on the lines of: "my dog's ill, can you tell me somewhere I can take him?" and these aren't necessarily people who aren't willing to get money together to pay a vet.
Thanks for making sure this got on the blog, esp since yours is well followed. I shared this on Facebook, it's making for interesting conversation, and people's idealism as well as basically not reading the bill really scares me. I have called my assembly person already, just to make sure he still is against this boondoggle.
I was going to leave links to Brent's blog and then found you already had them! His analysis is excellent. I do believe the economy is wreaking havoc as well, as here in DC we are seeing many folks in tears surrendering their dogs.
I am glad to see that this is the opinion of BADRAP. These animals will just get more hidden away, less vet care and end up on the streets and in the shelters.
Yes, ideally we would like people to be responsible pet owners, but giving the government yet more power that they can't handle is not the answer. They already want to tell us what breed we can or cannot own, now they will try to tell people that they have to spay and neuter? Good luck with that!
Community outreach? At what point do we admit this has not worked up to this point? MSN has worked extremely well in many communities specifically because animal control often works with dedicated pet owners and gets them the help they need to prevent surrenders. With the overwhelming amount of pit bulls in shelters and dying, I would think at this point every pit lover would be in favor of measures that would prevent more cruelty and death to their dogs.
PB, We've been watching closely, but we haven't seen anybody's breed specific MSN measures make a difference yet. And so far, we haven't seen anyone actually implement owner support programs in their communities. Owner support includes dog training, free and accessible spay/neuter surgeries, and general support for keeping dogs as part of the family during tough economic times.
we have free spay neuter in our area but so many people are in love with breeding pitbulls that it doesn't seem to help much and the officers are euthanasiing hing them from morning noon and night I think all of your crazy to oppose it there's too many people letting the pit bulls breed and that's the end of the story and it's also not fair to the taxpayers to have to deal with their problems
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