BarkingDogs.net

The Origin of a System Designed to Fail

As you read through the various sections of this website, at some point, it will occur to you that everything to do with the legal aspect of barking control is wildly ridiculous.

• "Anti barking" ordinances in which no amount of barking, no matter how extreme, is, in and of itself, deemed to be illegal

• A legal system that decides whether or not to act based on how the victim's neighbors choose to behave

• Victims denied legal protection because they are unable to do the impossible

• A burden of proof for barking dogs that exceeds what is required to have a human being legally put to death for capital murder

• Criminal matters that can only be resolved in civil court

• Laws that seem to have been designed to protect the perpetrators and hamstring their victims.

The absurdity of the animal control system first occurred to me when I was looking for relief from a barking problem in Westminster, California. At that point, I just assumed that the Westminster City Council had originated the three household ordinance and that it existed only in that one jurisdiction. I kept trying to visualize the group of people who could set out to originate an ordinance to eliminate the barking crises, and end up with the three household law. I pictured ten city council members, all of them the product of incest, with three teeth and thirty IQ points between them, as they met to dream the thing up.

"Ooh, ooh," squealed one excitedly. "I got an idear. Let's write a law that endangers the victim, establishes an impossible standard of proof, and takes a long time to work, if it works at all."

"I second that!" said another enthusiastically.

"Well, that ought to clear up that pesky barking epidemic," they all said in unison. Then, no doubt, they turned their attention to developing guidelines for the deregulation of the state's energy system.

Imagine that the police no longer wrote citations to speeding motorists. Imagine that, before anyone could be fined for speeding, three private citizens from three separate households, all residing along the street where the violation occurred, all had to do the following:

• confront the motorist about the violation

• document the violation in extensive fashion

• write letters describing the illegal speeding behavior in detail

• file the necessary paperwork with the city within the designated time frame, and

• appear in court to testify against the offender.

How many motorists do you think would be cited for speeding if that's how traffic enforcement was structured?

I was born in the morning, but it was not this morning. I could see that the three household law was not designed to work. On the contrary, it was constructed so as not to work. But that left me more perplexed than ever. Who would write and implement a law that was clearly intended not to work? Over the years my bewilderment turned to astonishment as I came to realize that multiple-household laws were not only in place through the length of California, but in other states as well. At that point it became clear that the multiple household ordinances are not simply the product of a few incompetent imbeciles who dreamed up an unfeasible law and put it in place without thinking. Someone invested a lot of time and a vast sum of money to ensure that the people of the United States would be saddled with unworkable barking laws for generations to come.

Some astute observer of the political process once noted that the U.S. has the best politicians money can buy. That being the case, getting a law passed requires a lot of lobbying, which in turn, requires vast resources. So, I asked myself, who has the time and money necessary to railroad an unworkable law into existence in multiple states? For the answer go to The solution to all of America's dog related problems

Go to New Animal Control.Org for more information about animal control reform

This page is part of Section Eight:
the Cause section of barkingdogs.net