Mar 02 2009
California’s SB 250
Have you heard about California’s SB 250 – The Pet Responsibility Act?
Consider this: According to the 2009 ca shelter report, in the 61 days since January 1: 84,801 pets have been killed in CA shelters, and $42,349,973 in taxes spent to house & kill them.
Each year, over $250 million dollars is spent housing and euthanizing homeless dogs and cats in California. Approximately 1 million dogs and cats enter California’s shelters each year, and over half of them are euthanized.
This enormous number of homeless pets means that every dog born in the state of California today has nearly a 1 in 4 chance of ultimately becoming homeless and dying in a shelter.
SB 250 provides a reasonable, fiscally responsible step towards reducing pet overpopulation in California. The bill simply requires that dogs be spayed or neutered unless their owner/guardian obtains an unaltered dog license when they license their animal.
In Defense of Animal’s Dr. Elliot Katz says Senator Dean Florez’s new spay/neuter bill is “wonderful news, a historic step to help end the terrible killing of so many animals. Hopefully this will pass quickly and be a model for the nation.”
According to SB 250 The Pet Responsibility Act:
- Licensed dogs may be left unaltered if the owner/ guardian chooses. Owners cited for violating local or state laws may have their license revoked or be required to spay or neuter.
- SB 250 saves the state millions of dollars by reducing homeless pets.
- License costs, fines and implementation details are at the discretion of local jurisdictions.
Similar spay and neuter legislation is currently being introduced across the country. In California, a diverse coalition of elected officials, law enforcement agencies, city and county agencies, humane societies and SPCAs, veterinarians and veterinary hospitals, national animal welfare organizations, California rescue organizations, and thousands of individuals and organizations support spay and neuter legislation like SB 250.
Learn more about SB 250 here.
SB250 is a very bad bill. It is the discredited and defeated AB1634 all over again with a few more bad provisions.
I am so tired of this endless fight but I will never give up since I cannot abandon the future of the rare and ancient and wonderful breed of hounds I share my life with to the absurd ravings of the “animal rights” agenda. I spent almost two years of my life educating legislators about the realities of how and why animals end up in shelters and I now must find all those AB1634 stastitics in the recesses of my computer which proved that forced sterlization laws do NOT reduce shelter intakes and often increase them. People who dump animals will dump them even faster when faced with big licence fees and regulations.
The “discretion of local jurisdictions” is the horrible part of this bill. There is absolutely no limit on what these local jurisdictions can require. In many local jurisdictions it already costs $150 or more per year per intact animal and there is nothing in this law that will prevent them from increasing that a hundredfold or a thousandfold. They can also impose restrictions which will make it impossible for even the most responsible breeder in the world to have a litter as is happening in L.A and elsewhere.
If people really want to make sure that every adoptable animal gets a home, they should look at things that really work. If you really want to stop the euthanasia in shelters, read Nathan Winograd’s “Redemption; The myth of pet overpopulation and the rise of the No Kill movement in America”.