Gawd was purporting to be providing a legal definition of the word “neglect” and assumed that the definition of “negligence” was relevant. I guess I should have made it clear I was responding to his misinterpretation of those words as legal terms. I admit I overstated it by saying that the two terms are not related; the point I wanted to make is that negligence,as a legal term, is not relevant here.
Gawd, someone who has no legal training is out of his element when he attempts to interpret legal terms.
Sorry Chula, I still don’t see how the legal definition doesn’t apply. And for the last FUCKING time, I only provided it because DanielWithrow said it was necessary for discussion. Not because it was relevant, or applied, or even had anything to do with the situation.
Chula, I didn’t know I needed a degree in law to provide a definition…I’ll run it by my boss in the AM.
Our animal control has one. They even have instructions on how to use it on the animal control “hotline”.
They leave the back door to a back room filled with kennels and a water supply open, they have a stack of one single sheet each for the people dropping the animal off to fill out.
And several instruction sheets posted around that “drop off” facility. But since you and I seem to be on the same side, I’ll cease and desist now.
Obviously, since I live in Anchorage, AK there would be no chance for Miller to have availed himself of that service!
I am renting my mobile home on a private lot to my boyfriends mother, she has a husky/wolf mix, one of the WORST “escape” artists in the world.
We built an 8ft tall fence and she managed to dig out from under, we finally put railroad ties all around the inside of the fence (buried somewhat), even at the gate (the gate swings OUTward, so the railroad tie can be safely on the inside of the dog kennel and now she can’t get out.
If she learns to climb? We’ll put a topper on the kennel, but so far she’s given up.
All of my local shelters are staffed pretty late, so I’ve never had the chance to see a “doggy night-drop”. You learn something new every day…well, besides how to turn a discussion of the definition of “neglect” into a total dead-horse subject, that is.
Sam, show me one instance ever of a person’s being prosecuted for negligence because they let a dog run loose, and I’ll concede the point.
Mockingbird, your reading comprehension is surpassed only by your tact.
Most importantly, Miller, thank you; I was concerned for the dog, for the owner, and for the shelter, and I really appreciate both your checking back with the shelter and your letting us know the outcome.
Three times in 60 days you find your neighbor’s car on the side of the road. Keys are in it, your neighbor’s ID is in it. You may think your neighbor is an incredible moron for leaving his/her car on the side of the road like that, but the first two times you return the car anyway. The third time, you decide to to teach your neighbor a lesson; you remove your neighbor’s ID from the car and take it to an auto salvage yard.
You just stole the car. The instant you removed the ID and took it someplace other than back to your neighbor, you became a car thief.
Do you see the parallel? If you know something belongs to someone, and you take it without their permission, it’s stealing. I’m not sure why this is a difficult concept to grasp. If anyone wants, I’ll be happy to post both the lay and legal definitions of the word “steal.”
And based on my personal experience, I don’t think we have enough information to arbitrarily claim that the dog owner(s) in this case were negligent. In fact, they went to the time, trouble and expense to have their dog chipped at some point. That does not indicate a propensity to adopt a pattern of negligence.
To be fair, Sauron, some jurisdictions require that an animal be chipped; California leads the country in this respect.
And the reason I asked for clarification on the “neglect” word is because it’s one commonly used in animal control circles, where it has specific meanings. While we can accuse just about anyone of negligence toward their animals (didja forget to clean the litterbox before going to bed? Negligence!), the word derives its emotional weight from cases of gross negligence, where animals are starved to death or are left chained up in the yard without shelter from the summer sun or are fitted with collars so tight that they gouge intot he animal’s flesh and cause open maggot-infested wounds.
So in lay parlance, this dog’s owner, along with virtually every other pet owner in the world, was guilty of neglect. That’s an uninteresting statement, so I pointed out that a legal definition would be appropriate. Sam gave a definition of neglect that is hardly more specific, and hasn’t so far mentioned a single case in US history in which a person has been prosecuted for “neglect” based on their dogs running loose.
Not really a problem. He’s just backed into a corner, and rather than admit he was using hyperbole, he’s defending that corner to the death.
Sorry Sauron those two situations are not comparable even a little bit
Try this one…Miller finds the owners’ child running around in traffic THREE times and the first two times returns her…the third time pissed beyond all measure he takes the kid to child welfare instead
Is he guilty of kidnapping?
Even if you accept YOUR senario…if he instead of taking the car to the junkyard he turned the car in to the police(this would make your analogy at least a LITTLE on point) that would NOT make him a car thief
Finding someones’ property and turning it in to the proper authorities does not now and never has made someone a thief
We all agree he shouldn’t of removed the tags(in a moment of frustration after having to rescue that dog twice before)…he did however leave HIS contact information and has since given the shelter the owners’ info
Could he of handled it better? Sure but he did NOT steal that dog and simply repeating he did ad nauseum isn’t convincing anyone here
To clarify: I’ve said that what he did was probably illegal, and I’ve tried to be consistent in that. I’m not a lawyer, however, and so I’ll defer to any attorneys that come into the thread on this subject. Law students need not apply, natch. To the extent that I have once or twice forgotten the adverb, my apologies.
I do consider it to be morally stealing, however.
Taking a dog to a shelter has the primary purpose of removing the dog from danger to itself or to others. This is not theft, even though it makes it more difficult for the owner to get the animal back, since lessening those chances isn’t the primary purpose.
Removing the tags has the primary purpose of lowering the owner’s chance of having their animal returned to them. What is theft, if not an action whose primary purpose is to lower a property owner’s chances of retrieving their property?
Again, I consider it to be, morally speaking, theft. I am not qualified to discuss whether it is, legally speaking, theft. We animal control types turn all cases of potential theft over to police officers: animal control codes don’t normally cover such cases.
In any case, the situation is resolved now, and my thanks again to Miller for everything he did (except for taking the tags off). Now we’re just cleaning up with the semantics.
I give up, Tommyturtle. We obviously operate under different interpretations of words.
If you know something belongs to someone and decide to take it and not return it to them, you’ve stolen it. If you turn it in to the authorities and say “I know who owns this but for the time being I’m not telling you,” I don’t see how that makes it any better.
If you find someone’s wallet and take it to the police, obviously you’re not a thief. If you remove any ID from the wallet beforehand, though, you make it much harder for the person to get their wallet, yes?
Simply taking something to the authorities doesn’t make one a thief. Taking measures to prevent the person from regaining their property – yeah, you’re moving in thief territory now.
THat’s interesting, Daniel, because not a single one of those statements came out of your ass when you asked for a legal clarification of the term. In fact, for you to deny, as an animal caretaker, that the man was not being neglectful of his animal makes no sense whatsoever.
I won’t deny that the term neglect can apply to such small things as not cleaning a dog run for a few days or not cleaning a litterbox, but to let a dog roam free and not be concerned of it’s whereabouts is truly neglectful. I’m once again sorry you can’t see my point, but you are being deliberately obtuse.
Not once in this exchange have you or anyone else asked for a cite in which a dog owner who failed to keep his dog in his posession was deemed neglectful. From what I know of animal control authorities, only the grossest cases ever get prosecuted, so I seriously doubt that you will find where a dog owner with these habitual violations was taken to court.
Yes I have engaged in hyperbole. As I pointed out earlier, there isn’t a single person here who hasn’t. If you deny it, you’re once again, being obtuse.
Sauron we are not as far apart in our thinking as you suggest
If Miller had gone into the owners’ yard and took the dog(because in his OPINION the dog was not being properly taken care of) then turned it in to a shelter(tags intact or not) I would say yes he then stole the dog no matter how morally correct he may of been IN HIS OPINION
But this was different…the owner had already been deprived of his property due to the actions of the dog and was in mortal danger…he was in NO obligation to return the dog to the owner even the first time…if he cared to get involved at all he could of taken the pet to the shelter and been done with it
If he had done so without giving HIS contact info to the shelter then you might have more of a case
I can imagine his disgust at having to rescue someone elses’ dog three times and removing the tags in a momentary lapse of judgement but since according to him he shortly thereafter gave the shelter the tags
During that brief period after he had turned in the dog and before he gave the tags back he MIGHT be considered to have “stolen” the dog…although given his reasons for doing so I doubt if I were on a jury in this crime of the century I personally would not vote to convict him
One last attempt to put this “stealing” business to bed …
The actual legal charge for what we’re talking about here is “theft.” Here’s a quote from Justice Paul E. Peifer of the Ohio State Supreme Court (Miller isn’t in Ohio, but this is the first one I found in a search):
"The involved legal definition of ‘theft’ states, in part, that ‘no person, with purpose to deprive the owner of property or services, shall knowingly obtain or exert control over either the property or services…without the consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent.’ "
As has been said before, if Miller had just taken the dog to the shelter without removing his tags, he would’ve been fine. However, by removing the tags, he intended to deprive the owner of property, and knowingly exterted control over the property without consent of the owner. In fact, as stated in his OP, Miller obviously didn’t want the original owner of the dog to get the animal back.
