You’re right, it was, you fucking babykiller.
What aren’t you ignorant of?
I’ll make the same offer I made toward weirddave in the other thread: if anyone else finds anything Metacom is saying to be remotely persuasive, reasonable, or interesting, let me know, and I’ll address it. Otherwise, I think he’s being astonishingly stupid, and not worth dealing with further.
Daniel
Why do you want to punish a group of people for something they could potentially do? Not all breeders end up with their animals going into the pound and being euthanized; therefore, not all breeders should be punished for pet overpopulation. If you want to punish the people responsible for pet overpopulation or make them responsible for more of the cost, then punish the people responsible for pet overpopulation. Make it a crime to abandon a pet, charge a hefty fee to retreive an animal from a shelter, immediately euthanize all animals that aren’t wearing tags or micochipped, whatever.
Punishing people for something they haven’t done is just wrong–Should we prohibit women from drinking because some women drink when they’re pregnant? Sure, we’d end up with less people like Left Hand of Dorkness, but we’d also be creating a hardship for a lot of innocent people, and that’s wrong.
Again, “people who choose to breed their dogs” are not responsible for the pet overpopulation problem.
This all leads down the path the loony animal rights fringe wants us to take: When we start using laws to discourage people, even responsible ones, from breeding their animals on the basis that it’s harmful to animals we place the interests of animals ahead of the interests of people. And unless you’re an animal rights nutter, that’s bad.
My dog wasn’t traumatized by the neutering. Though he does gets a little upset when I laugh and call him “Mr. No-Scrote” while I point to his testicles on the mantle in their little jar of formaldehyde.
Ask any animal behaviorist: If you have a dog with any sort of aggressive tendencies (be they people-aggressive, dog-aggressive, resource-protective, or dominance-aggressive), neuter him. More often than not, if you take the androgens away, you take away the aggression.
May not fix your problem completely, but it’s the first step.
Trust me, even with all my years of experience working with dogs, I’ve recently have been working with a puppy whose dominance-aggressive behavior had me completely stumped. Step one, THE BIG SCHNIPP. Step two, behaviorist consult.
I had all sorts of good reasons to keep him intact - he’s a stellar example of the breed conformation-wise, he’s bright, has a lot of herding drive, and his work ethic is phenomenal. His breeder was hoping he’d “turn out” and that we could keep his genes in the gene pool, as it were. But, that was not meant to be. He was schnipped at 7 months, and we’re working out our problems.
I can only imagine what happens when you put an aggressive dog in a household with people who don,t know what to do about it, and who keep said dog intact.
Well, I don’t really have to imagine, I guess I can just open up the newspaper and read about maulings. Those blasted things are not breed specific… which is why breed bans are a poor idea anyway… but meh, that’s another debate for another time.
Many of the people responsible for pet overpopulation are what we call “back yard breeders”, these are people who have no business breeding animals because they have no idea what they’re doing. For one thing, you can’t make money responsibly breeding dogs.
A responsible breeder will breed dogs with good temperaments, good characteristics of the breed and no genetic defects. They breed their dogs to further the quality of the breed, not to make money. They often show their dogs in conformation trials and obedience trials and they want to produce puppies that will do well in these areas.
They will take their dogs to a vet regularly, they will get it vaccinated, they will have it tested for certain genetic problems that they would not want to pass on (such as hip dysplasia, eye and heart diseases). They will not breed a dog with such problems.
They would make sure that they are well-prepared for the whelping and they would know when to get help for the bitch if there was a problem and they would not hesitate to pay large sums of money for a c-section to save the bitch and her puppies.
They would pay extra fees and licenses for their intact animals without complaint. They would not breed a bitch on her first heat and on each heat thereafter. They would retire her while still young and spay her before she’s too old and can develop cancers or uterine infections.
They will start the puppies on vaccines and be certain they are free of parasites.
They will seek new homes for their puppies with responsible owners, spending extra money on advertising and spending time taling with all potential owners and educating them on the breed, care and training. They will sell show quality puppies to those people they know will be responsible and further the breed and the other puppies will be sold as pets and they encourage the new owners to spay and neuter their pets.
Backyard breeders do none of these things. They don’t really even care what happens to the puppies after they get their money. They don’t care if they just sold their dog to someone who’s also going to be a backyard breeder. They don’t care if the person lets their dog run loose, vaccinates, trains, spays and neuters. They care nothing about the breed or the animal.
As I said, responsible pet breeders will not mind paying higher license fees for their intact pets and they will keep those pets from breeding indiscriminately. How is preventing pet overpopulation which leads to dog attacks, diseases, overflowing pet shelters and animal cruelty a bad thing?
These dogs scare the hell out of me, and there are so many of them around here.
That last story about that girl, that’s about 2 blocks away from my house.
My oldest son’s next door neighboor has one, and I see them, especially in this neighborhood, just about every day. Sometimes without leashes, running alongside someone on a bicycle, etc. Last week on my way home from work I almost ran one over as it chased a chicken out into the street right in front of my car.
I’ve always told my boys to stay away from strange dogs, all strange dogs, but I made it especially clear to them when we saw the news vans outside yesterday and heard what happened. So soon after the other attacks in the area.
Fucking ridiculous. All I can do is hope it puts current pit bull owners into action, to take more responsibility and neuter their dogs, train them properly, and keep them leashed.
What **Wile E **said.
The first Rotties I ever saw were from Germany - they were fairly unknown here (in the South). Beautiful, obedient dogs that I really liked. Backyard breeders have turned this breed into one that I am afraid of. Deathly afraid of.
Amen.
I’m against breed-specific laws, and discrimination by insurance companies based on breeds. Italy has breed-specific laws requiring corgis, my favorite dog breed (among many others), to be muzzled at all times in public (Poor corgis).
But these asswipes who keep vicious, unaltered dogs, too often pit bulls, make it so much easier for people to support laws that ban a specific breed . :mad:
Sorry for the double post, but I wanted to add this:
When I worked at our local humane society, I took in 3 littlers of black lab mix puppies from the same man. From the same dog. He didn’t claim to be a breeder. He was just too fucking lazy to get off his ass and get the dog spayed. We offered him low-cost (about $30 for shots and spay), and he wouldn’t bring her in. I really don’t think it was the money - he was well dressed and drove a nice car. The third time, I offered to do it for free if he would bring her in. He did not keep the appointment. He never donated a dime for care of the puppies.
Why did I take them? Because if I didn’t, he would stop on the side of the road and throw them out. The semi-rural areas near here have a problem with packs of feral dogs chasing their horses.
My apologies for going on for so long, but this is a sore subject for me. Most of my work has been with feral cats and cat rescue, rather than dogs, but I have nursed too many who never should have been born. And 6 of my 8 cats are rescues I bottle raised.
We punish drunk drivers because they could potentially crash into another car, or potentially run someone over, because they could potentially kill themselves or others. It’s reckless behavior that has a social cost.
We obviously can’t, logistically and financially speaking, just track down the irresponsible owners. Thus, it seems fair to me that if you want to have an animal that hasn’t been fixed, you would be part of the obvious group to help pay for the consequences of abandoned pets.
To go one step further: if a tax is a punishment, then we punish all drivers when we tax their vehicles, charge them for obtaining a driver’s license. The requirement for all drivers to have insurance is presumably also a punishment, since not all drivers will crash into something.
It’s an idiotic idea that a tax is a punishment.
Daniel
So are you saying that keeping an intact animal is reckless behaviour?
I know responsible breeders that have up to 10 dogs; you’re telling me they “will not mind” paying $1000? Hell, I’ll probably breed in several years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that I’d mind paying $300-500 to help with a problem I’m not responsible for and isn’t on my “list of important social issues”. Does that make me irresponsible? :rolleyes:
:rolleyes:
Most criminals come from abusive homes; let’s shoot all children that have been abused. It will lead to fewer crimes. How is preventing murder a bad thing?
The ends don’t always justify the means.
Only, I didn’t take that “one step further” that you just took. I’m not saying that all tax is a punishment; you are. I’m only saying that this particular tax, which is clearly designed to discourage a specific behaviour, is a punishment.
Sheesh. I think I liked your little “WAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! I DISAGREE WITH YOU! THAT’S IGNORANCE! I’M GOING TO IGNORE YOU!!! WAAAHHHHHHHH!!!” act better then this strawman bullshit.
Equating shooting children with fixing dogs? Really? It doesn’t seem like the “means” are at all the same in this case.
I wasn’t equating children with fixing dogs. I was exagerating the rhetoric to make a point about the sentence that I quoted immediately before that line: “How is preventing pet overpopulation which leads to dog attacks, diseases, overflowing pet shelters and animal cruelty a bad thing?”.
The implication of that sentence is that if you think preventing dog attacks, disease, and animal cruelty is bad you’ll support charging everyone with an intact animal extra on their licensing fees. But that implication ignores the possibility that you can agree that dog attacks, etc. are bad while at the same time thinking that the means in this case–the more expensive dog licenses–are bad.
Many local areas (and this is almost always local law) have a prohibition against having more than 2 or 3 adult dogs or cats on a premisis.
Any more than that and the person would have to be registered in some way as a kennel or cattery - with some fees involved. This is how most townships or counties try to get at unresponsible breeders. They invariably won’t have a kennel permit and thus will need to either pay the dollars to get one (and be subject to inspection in some cases) or reduce the number of animals on the property.
Because these tend to be township and county level ordinances - there are HUGE variations in local law. All is takes is a lawyer and a few judges sympathetic to animal issues and there will be scads of laws on the books on things like how long an outdoor tether has to be, outlawed breeds, spay/neuter penalties and everything else. One county over, and it perfectly OK to keep a lion and tiger in your basement as long as you pay the $15 fee to the DNR.
If you can’t afford to take proper care of your animals, or go through the proper licensing, then you really can’t afford to be a breeder.
Did I say they can’t afford to take care of their animals, or afford the fees? No. I said they’d mind paying them. There’s a big difference.