Animal Control and the Law

I’m no lawyer but I can think of more than a half-dozen “kinds” of law, all of which might involve animals:

1. Felony offenses like murder, and major robberies, which all of us understand as law. (Dogs have been repeatedly defined as “deadly weapons” when used to rob or otherwise attack people. People have been held under manslaughter laws when allowing or urging their animals to kill.)

2. Misdemeanor offenses like driving laws which are understood by people, though they might disagree. (Seatbelts for humans, restraints for dogs in the back of pickups.)

3. Regulations which are written into administrator’s handbooks and contain many definitions. (What is a leash? What is “own?” What are the fees for impoundment, licenses, offenses? How should horses who are used for horse-drawn carriages on the city streets be regulated?)

4. Laws that rise up from the citizenry through referendums, like drunk driving laws. (No horses in town. Dog and/or cat licensing.)

5. Laws that refer to treaties, which may even transcend national law. (Migratory bird law, which is international and protects almost all birds.)

6. Natural laws that enforce themselves, like falling off a log.

Thesis: the whole culture has a great preoccupation with laws, probably from trying to get some kind of consensus about events that are seen in radically different ways by different parts of the citizenry. The traditional transition problems between country and city are now joined by difficult transitions through immigration. People who have finally given up on keeping goats in town are now treated to the sight of a live goat being killed, butchered and barbecued in the yard of their neighbors.

This puts major emphasis on consequences and the sorting out in court that happens AFTER troublesome incidents. Some of the laws also require an army of enforcers creating a sea of paper and a certain amount of snitching on the part of citizens, instead of the exertion of peer pressure. And it preoccupies another large body of people who sit around trying to imagine contingencies and think up rules against them, always limited by the experiences of the thinkers.

People do what they do because of habit, conventional behavior and peer pressure, assumptions about how things work, convenience, negligence. Probably this side of things needs more work, which means getting out on the street and talking to people. Animal control officers rarely think of this as part of their duties, but it would be very helpful if they did. Even less than wildlife wardens, animal control officers are not trained to think in terms of ecologies, the interlinking of minor forces that can converge to create a big problem. For instance, increasing density of pups -- immature litters -- can be tinder for a distemper plague that burns through many pets and what I’d like to call “interstitial animals” -- that is, animals that live in the offal-rich spaces of inhabited places. Raccoons, possoms, rats, squirrels, crows, and so on. Maybe a coyote or two.

No one wants to take responsibility for these unowned animals -- except that a lot of people like to feed them, which adds to the problem and which is a cultural force. Feeding birds is considered a generosity and a delight. Trying to make people stop feeding birds is pretty hard, as bear specialists will tell you. Even along wilderness areas where bears will SURELY be attracted to a bird feeder or an apple tree, people persist in having bird feeders and apple trees. They are Good Thing, as Martha Stewart would say.

Jurisdictions are a big part of the law -- when is a problem an animal control problem? In urban environments, animal control managers will try to limit jurisdiction to owned animals (well, and those in the same species as common pets, even if they are feral) while pushing responsibility over to the wildlife people (usually state as opposed to city or county AC) for the “interstitials.” The argument is that they have the proper expertise and equipment. And anyway, pet control is funded by licensing but no one buys a possom license.

On the hand, people do have a disconcerting way of making raccoon, skunks and so on into pets. There used to be a big mean boar raccoon who belonged to a family in my district. I must have quarantined it for biting people (mostly kids trying to be friendly) at least three times. (The animal had shots, but no one knows whether rabies shots work to make raccoons immune to rabies. Raccoons are exceptionally susceptible to rabies, which is killed by sunlight, because the animals are nocturnal.) Finally the law was changed to include that raccoon in laws meant for dogs, and it was ordered out of town.

We also had a long episode, promoted by the media, resulting from a New Year’s Eve reveler who met a skunk on the sidewalk in the wee smalls and tried to pet it. The skunk bit him. He had to have the rabies shots himself before I could find that skunk. There were a lot of jokes about “pink skunks.” At last I found the family who owned the skunk, but they swore they never let it out -- always shut it into the basement at night. A quick perambulation of the house revealed a hole in the foundation with skunk tracks going in and out. The skunk was the usual black and white.

Speaking of rabies, gateway laws (like those regarding boarding airline passengers) have helped to keep England rabies-free and the US rabies-scarce. But a man who brought his son and a found dog home from Mexico in a small personal airplace, inadvertently brought rabies with him. The dog was incubating the virus and bit the son, who was one of the first people to survive because he ended up in the Oregon Health Sciences University where he was put on massive life support until his brain could recover. (More later.) The bill was astronomical and the insurer probably didn’t have to pay it, because the dog was brought into the country illegally.

The point is that even if the perfect laws are passed, unless the knowledge of “why” is out there in society, unless the mechanisms for triggering inspection and forced compliance are funded, unless the laws are clear and boundaries real, then bad stuff still happens. And there is no way to legislate that people should stop being stupid.