The Things People Worry About

This past Monday night, Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC's Countdown program, included Lancaster PA in his "Worst Persons in the World" feature. It seems an LA Times article about the abundance of surveillance cameras in Lancaster City made us out to be George Orwell's nightmare, because we're spying on each other in an attempt to reduce crime, sacrificing personal privacy for what's probably an imaginary sense of safety.

This got me thinking. First, I'm not totally in favor of the cameras, for that very well-known Orwellian reason -- I don't like the idea of me or anyone else being "watched" by the government or law enforcement, or even a corporation (as we are in Lancaster, where the Safety Coalition, which puts up and monitors the cameras, is largely funded by corporations and corporate bigwigs who put up cash as individuals). On the other hand, I know of multiple crimes that have been solved on my own block thanks to the cameras -- one was a duo of moron girls who were wearing hoodies and masks and holding up people with a b-b gun. I have no guilt over denying those two mean-spirited nitwits their privacy, thank you. The cameras are also aimed at the streets, not into windows or back yards (as far as I know), so as someone whose street is video-taped constantly, I have yet to feel any loss of privacy. No, I can't nip out onto my front step in the nude to grab the newspaper, but I wasn't planning on that anyway.

So what does this have to do with the mission of the League of Humane Voters? After all, this blog is supposed to be about the legislative changes we work for, to improve the lives of animals. Well, here's the link, at least in my mind. The furor over the cameras got me thinking about what bothers people and why, and what, if anything, people are willing to do when something bothers them.

Recent news (heck, not just recently, this sort of news is perpetual) has shown us the depths to which humans can sink when it comes to cruelty, especially to animals. Days-old puppies tossed in the garbage. A puppy miller's "vet" chops off a puppy's tail without anesthesia. Dogs found with broken legs, lying in the gutter, cats set aflame, injured farm animals beaten by slaughterhouse workers, laboratory chimps tortured over and over to obtain useless medical data -- it's everywhere, every day, and when it comes to dogs and farm animals, it's happening every day within a stone's throw of the hated, privacy-stealing, uproar-causing cameras in Lancaster City. It's even happening IN the City, where dog fighting is an ongoing (I see chewed up pit bulls on the street all the time) but generally ignored problem.

But what do some people in Lancaster County and most of our legislators worry about? When it comes to the issues of puppy mills in particular and animal cruelty in general, they worry about people's livelihoods. Many legislators don't want to be seen to thwart anyone's ability to earn a buck, unless it's a union worker or someone on minimum wage. For those poor souls, it's tough luck, because corporate bottom lines reign supreme. When it comes to the "entrepreneurs" running puppy mills, however, it's mostly a hands-off approach. Don't risk any guy in a straw hat losing his business, even if he's earning money by breeding dogs to death, creating sick, inbred puppies, torturing dogs on a daily basis with do-it-yourself-at-home "medical procedures", serving bug-and-feces-covered food, providing freezing cold or steaming hot facilities (depending on the season), and ignoring noxious fumes from poor ventilation. But hey, you get a few hundred dogs in one place, and you're bound to have a mess, right?

Right. And that's why nobody should ever HAVE a few hundred dogs. Huge breeding operations cannot be run safely or humanely. It's just not possible. And it's wrong to treat dogs, who we call "man's best friend" on the one hand and then churn out in sick, twisted droves on the other, like a product. They're not products, they're creatures with a full nervous system, capable of feeling pain, anguish, panic, and an array of emotions that anyone who's ever known a dog can attest to. Does any legislator with his own dog think that the dog crouched in a cage (from which she's never, or rarely released) on some "farm" is feeling anything less than his own pet feels? Those sad eyes when you leave, those joyful leaps when you come home, the dog barking to protect the house or to alert his family to fire or an injured child -- these phenomena are not myths or sappy stories, they're true. And the dogs tortured every day in Central PA's puppy mills are being ignored -- by legislators who care more about the "farmer" earning a living than about the fact that he's a greedy sadist who needs to lose his or her kennel license (if they even have one) and look for another line of work. Worse, these legislators are ignoring their constituents, who overwhelmingly support stamping out puppy mills and cracking down on breeders who breed too many dogs to do it right. The voters aren't out to stop dog breeding (and that's not our intention, either -- we're realists), but they do want the torture to stop and the sadistic greed that causes it to be punished.

HB 39 languishes in committee (see my previous blog entry), the dog tethering bill continues to be an uphill battle, and the Puppy Mill law passed several months ago had so few teeth and was so badly neutered (pardon the expression) by the PA Senate that you could run 500 hundred big dogs through the holes it created for greedy sadists to exploit for their own continued gain.

And now some thoughts for the voters, especially those who care about the puppy mill issue but have never called their House rep or PA Senator: A legislator who can turn his or her back on these atrocities and continue to worry more about some "farmer" losing his income is the same person who'll deny funding for human concerns too -- services for the poor and their children, education, health care, initiatives to clean up the planet, green energy, open space protection, and more -- things that matter to everyone, and on which the voters' needs and desires are clear -- and also usually ignored.

So let's put up some cameras in Central PA's countryside. Focus them on the barn where barking dogs can be heard (but are never seen), where suburbanites from all over the country (and Joe Biden, our own Vice President) pull up to buy a puppy, where dogs are bred for pet stores, where torture is happening right now, at the hands of a greedy, sadistic "farmer" who sees dogs as a cash crop. I won't feel a moment's guilt denying privacy to those mean-spirited nitwits, either.