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California To Create Public Animal Abuser Registry
An anonymous reader writes "California legislators are moving forward with plans to create a public, online, animal abuser registry identical in function to the public sex offender registry. Is this the slippery slope to further government mandated lists and registries?"
Apparently they estimate that it will take several hundred thousand dollars to run the registry annually and claim that the number of federal convictions for animal abuse in California is not large enough to levy enough fees on the convicted to fund the registry. In short, they want to levy a tax on pet food to pay for the registry.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I can't stand PETA in general, but (hypocritical as they are) this is one of their few campaigns I *do* support. The fact is, most unwanted pets are not going to find homes, so it's better to take them in, make an effort to place them, and then humanely euthanize them (which no, is NOT animal abuse) than to abandon them at a trash dump, throw them off a pier, or beat them with a club.
I have worked with cows and chickens. I grew up on a ranch, worked on a dairy, and occasionally helped out a friend who worked on a chicken ranch. Cattle are not very bright beasts. The calves will drink their mothers' milk until their innards burst, and the adults are content, so long as they know where to find the food. As for chickens... I just cannot feel remorse for any alleged suffering that has been applied to a creature whose behavior does not change, after its head has been removed, leaving only a portion of its brain stem.
In my experience with these creatures, I have not seen any evidence of sentience. They have no ability to behave outside of instinct, and insofar as I can tell, memory is only established through repetition.
These animals are not people. They are food.
Now, I can understand the concept of a "Sex Offenders" registry. Victims of rape or pedophilia experience a lasting and significant impact on their lives, from the events, impacting everything from their feelings of personal security and self-confidence, to even grander things such as sexual orientation (and all of its permutations). The desires that inspired sex offenders to perform the act(s) which got them on the list are generally not the sort of thing that one leaves behind in his life, but rather, something that (s)he must live with, indefinitely. Therefore, keeping a publicly accessible registry of these people is, more or less, a fair thing to do.
Animal abuse, however, is generally not driven by hormones that are persistent through life, but rather, the adolescent hormone cocktail, or general ignorant belligerence. It's really not the sort of thing that needs a registry, because the behavior can be effectively turned off with minimal effort, or may even go away on its own. Normal punitive measures are generally sufficient. To require people involved in this sort of crime to add their names to a public registry is ridiculous.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
The logic behind "registries", not that I'm a fan of them, is based on the perceived danger of the offender, and likelihood of re-offending(and, in practice, the degree of public revulsion toward that particular crime), not on the seriousness of the crime per se. If seriousness of crime were the criterion, we would have started with a murderer's registry and worked down from there.
Now, I think all of these criminal registries are a bad idea. If somebody is so dangerous that they need to be on a special public list and announce themselves to their neighbors, and never live within a thousand yards of pretty much anything, and so forth, why are they out of jail? If they are not, in fact, that dangerous, how can viciously hounding them for petty political gain possibly do anything but increase their chances of re-offending? You don't want a potential criminal drifting from odd job to odd job, living at a mixture of no fixed address and really shitty parts of town. That's just a recipe for them to do something else in the future. You want them enmeshed in all the cares of a solid citizen with a white picket fence and a mortgage as quickly as possible. Plus, of course, there is the well documented stream of absurd cases, 16/18 couples, yobbish but harmless public urinators, that poor bastard who was wandering around inside his own house without the shades drawn. Just not a good idea. The idea that there are people safe enough to release from jail; but so dangerous that they must be stigmatized forever seems absurdly contradictory; and the consequences of that notion are bad for liberty.
However, that said, I don't think animal abuse cases are any less logical than sex crime cases for the (admittedly bad) idea of a registry. Again, registries are about an individual's dangerousness. This is generally established through some sort of crime, so they end up being based on more or less serious crimes; but the motive is to identify dangerous people(an ordinary criminal record keeps track of crimes). Animal abuse, of the sort that actually makes it to court(which usually implies animal abuse not in the context of some useful production/research activity, or within such a context; but of extraordinary depravity), is not a serious crime compared to sex crimes(since we generally accord animals substantially less moral personhood than we do people, harming them just isn't as serious); but people who harm animals just for giggles are, in fact, generally Bad News. Animals may not experience suffering in any morally salient way; but their pain responses are eminently convincing looking. Anybody who finds those recreational is, indeed, of deeply suspect character(if they also enjoy setting fires, you are in *cough*Macdonald triad*cough* territory).
If anything, animal abusers are probably better subjects for a registry than sex criminals are. In both cases, the crimes are evidence of serious personality and behavioral issues; but the victims of animal abusers are not as morally salient, so it is harder to justify long custodial sentences. Again, I think registries are a bad plan; but I would argue that, if there were a good place to start, it'd be animal abusers. Because such registries inevitably go skiing right down the slippery slope, they would end up containing the poor bastard at the slaughterhouse who managed to make PETA's shit list, some guy who kicked a puppy in a momentary outburst and has felt terrible and done nothing harmful ever since, and a kid who pulled the wings off a couple of mosquitos after a summer of being bitten; but those results are no more absurd than what you get with the present registries.
Or, of course, you could just throw out the crude attempt to classify people based on their crimes, and classify based on psychological evaluation. What you really want is a list of sociopaths, whether they be the blue collar flavor who flip out and kill somebody, or the white collar flavor who can keep their inhumanity in check long enough to make it through business school and do some real damage...