Wednesday, February 27, 2008

LA micromanages pet owners,,,

It seems that Los Angeles has decided that they have time to micromanage pet owners.

I can accept the notion that a pet owner should be held responsible for the life, health, and happiness of the pet. But with that responsibility needs to come the right to make the decisions. Spaying/neutering is surgery, and surgery has risks.

I had a guinea pig who suffered an injured leg. To set said leg would have required that he be anesthetized. Only guinea pigs sometimes have adverse reactions to anesthesia, or at least they did back in the 1980s. That had to be taken into account.

But I had the right back then to make the calls. The City of Los Angeles clearly feels that they have the time and resources to boss pet owners around.

After all, it's not like Los Angeles didn't have bigger problems to deal with.

1 comment:

Ken Prescott said...

The City of Los Angeles clearly feels that they have the time and resources to boss pet owners around.

After all, it's not like Los Angeles didn't have bigger problems to deal with.


It's more a point of Los Angeles has a problem with abandoned litters, which are (a) food for predators, thus boosting their population and the risk they pose to humans, (b) reservoirs for diseases, some of which can hop from animals to humans, and (c) roadkill.

Mandating spaying and neutering is a much cheaper way of handling these problems.

The problem in our society is that too many people do not understand that the words "right" and "responsibility" are joined at the hip.