Animal cruelty legislation should be a no-brainer. Who would want to be known as the legislator who was in favor of performing painful medical procedures on dogs without anesthesia or antibiotics? Who'd want to be the person who looked the other way when the chance to stop real, tangible, proven suffering presented itself?
In the following article, "Anger Over Dog-Cruelty Bill Could Freeze Legislature", it seems that Dominic Pileggi, Republican and PA Senate majority leader is doing just that -- looking the other way on a chance to stop horrific medical procedures being performed by puppy millers looking to avoid scrutiny and save money. According to Thomas Caltagirone, Democrat, and head of the Judiciary Committee (and supporter of HB 39), the bill first waited way too long in the hands of the Senate's Agriculture Committee (chaired by Senator Mike Brubaker) and now it's being held up in the Judiciary. He considers it a stalling tactic.
Why would anyone want to stall or stop this bill? HB 39 requires that only a veterinarian can perform procedures such as caesarian sections (surgery to remove puppies from a pregnant dog), de-barking (which the LOHV favors outlawing entirely -- would you cut out a child's tongue if he or she was too noisy or kept making sounds that gave away the fact that you were running a sweatshop in your backyard? That's the reason so many millers de-bark their breeding dogs), and other procedures.
It's funny (not funny "ha ha") that when we're doing outreach events to the voters, they're often incredulous that things that should be illegal already are not. "You mean it's legal now to tie a dog outside 24/7 in PA?" Yep, it sure is, thanks to the same sort of delays on voting on the dog tethering bill, which has appeared in multple forms for the past few years. "You mean it's not illegal to sew up a dog with fishing line after cutting out her puppies, just to save money?" Nope, it's not illegal -- and it remains perfectly legal to do so, thanks to the sort of purposeful bottleneck currently being created in the PA Senate.
Contact your PA Senator today to ask that this bill be moved along and be voted on immediately. Here's a link to find your PA Senator's contact info -- all you'll need to do is insert your zip code in the box in the upper right of the resulting window, and you'll find out who your PA legislators are, and you can then click on the senators' name/s to obtain their phone numbers.
http://www.pasen.gov
Remember, calls work MUCH better than emails -- which are often deleted without being read, if the topic is one that the legislator and/or his staff would rather not deal with. Nice, huh? Taxpayers pay for the computers and software used to ignore the wishes of the voters.
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