It's Sunday, the recent posts have been amazing, spiritiual stories...but I got nothing along those lines at the moment.  So instead, I will once again discuss local ordinances and how they intrude on people's lives.

Pet limit laws are very much in vogue.  The various animals rights activist organizations are constantly working to pass more and more restrictive laws detailing what, where, and how you can keep animals on your property.  When these laws and ordinances are brought into law, they pat themselves on the back for "helping animals" and never consider the cost, to the people they are targeting or to the animals themselves.

For example, I have a friend who has many animals.  She's a breeder and is also involved in helping find homes for animals that have been given up by their owners (I hesitate to use the common word "rescue" because most or all are voluntarily given up by their owners and while there might have been ignorance on the part of the owner, there usually isn't active abuse).  She had quite a large number of birds at the time, but 1/3-1/2 of the number were tiny zebra finches kept in large colony cages, given to her as people got tired of them.  It wasn't like she had one hundred ostriches in her garage.  All of her animals are given excellent care.  She chose the city where she lives based on the animal ordinances, which only had limits on cats and dogs, which she kept to scrupulously.  Then there were some problems in the bird club we're in which resulted in someone anonymously calling animal control out of spite (the most likely candidate was actually hospitalized in a mental institution not long afterwards to give you an idea of the fun stuff that was involved).  Generally speaking, when someone complains, animal control investigates, so they came over.

 Now, they didn't have a search warrant and my friend shouldn't have let them in without one, but it's an easy mistake to make when you're taken off guard and frightened.  You don't want to get in trouble, so you want to be cooperative so they'll go easy on you.  Animal control made their inspection and were extremely impressed by her setup.  They said she took far better care of her animals than they did, that their report would note that everything was fine, and they even asked if they could call her for help if any pet birds came into the shelter.  Sounds good, right?

Some months later, the city council somehow heard about the incident.  They didn't look at the conclusion from animal control that everything was well cared for.  They simply looked at the numbers and said, "There should be a law!"  So they changed their pet ordinances to severely restrict the numbers of all animals and did not include a grandfather clause.  When my friend inquired, she was told she would be grandfathered in, but could never get anyone to commit to anything on paper.  As if that wasn't bad enough, when she bought her house, she was unaware that the addition that had been made to it was done without a building license.  It needs some repairs before the house can be sold so that she can move somewhere that can't confiscate her animals on a whim, but because of the lack of that building license by a previous owner, she legally can't make any repairs.  She's stuck between a rock and a hard place when she's done nothing wrong.  Her animals are inside most of the time other than reasonable outdoor time by the cats and dogs.  Things are kept nice and clean, no health hazards are present.  She's really not affecting her neighbors in any way.

 Such laws are very intrusive.  Here is an article about a town where citizens are fighting to keep the right to keep their pets.  There are many good arguments made about how responsible owners should not be punished for the misdeeds of irresponsible ones and how people with problems like hoarding certainly aren't going to be stopped by something like a law.  Additionally, so many animal laws are misguided and just plain wrong.  Until recently, ferrets were banned from my city due to being wild animals.  Nevermind the fact that ferrets have long been domesticated and were used for hunting rodents for centuries.  When ferret lovers finally got the city council to see reality, the law was finally changed...but they slipped in a change that cut down on the number of cats a person could have at the same time, apparently just because they could. 

 California is a common battleground with bizarre legislation coming up all the time.  A couple of years ago, PETA and the like were trying to pass a state law that was brutal in its treatment of breeders of all animals, required numerous types of inspection, and even dictated things such as cage sizes, number of material of perches, toys, and so on and so forth.  If it had passed, it would have required a huge amount of tax-payers' money to fund the inspections.  And of course, it didn't take into account the animals themselves even if that was supposedly who was going to be helped by it.  While the average animal control officer can certainly tell if a dog or cat is being treated well, they don't have a clue when it comes to exotics.  Also, by being so nit-picky, the law would have caused serious problems for animals with disabilities or other special needs, which often require living arrangements that would not have met state guidelines.  Currently PETA is trying to pass legislation in California that requires all animals to be spayed or neutered no matter what.  There's a bill frequently brought up at national levels that would require microchipping and registration with the FDA of every single animal in the country, from chickens to horses to cats and so on and so forth.  It hasn't passed yet, but the animal rights activists keep trying, despite (or rather because of) the negative effects this would have on both individuals and the entire agricultural industry.

Where does this intrusiveness end?  Why can we not be trusted to decide for ourselves whether we can handle x number of pets or what to feed them or how to house them?  If they're receiving proper amounts of food and water, are sheltered, their enclosures kept clean and safe, and they're not creating constant noise pollution, why should the government be able to tell us what we can and can't have?  How is keeping two great danes equivalent to keeping two chihuahuas?  A little yard that wouldn't be good for even one big dog could be great for a number of small dogs, or not matter at all if the only animals on the property are kept indoors.  We need to encourage our elected leaders to change laws to make the care of an animal the important thing, not the type or number.  We also need to support the fight to keep this legislation from passing anywhere, even if it's not local, because once something passes somewhere, there are groups that try to spread it.  This is a huge issue for everyone, whether they're animal lovers, have pets, or even just happen to eat meat.

I keep trying to come up with a wonderful, thoughtful, relevant first post here on DB that will blow everyone away.  With such high expectations of myself, of course I've been failing miserably.  So instead, I'm going to dip my toes in the water with a rant about something that's closer to petty than deep.

I've seen libertarian philosophy summed up as, "Get off my lawn."  I can't say I'm insulted by this, because darn it, getting people off my lawn is a real problem these days.  City and county officials think they should be able to dictate what I can and can't do with my own property.  This has long annoyed me, but it's really been driven home how intrusive it is since we bought our first house last month.  We live in an old neighborhood, so we're not having to deal with HOA issues as well (we specifically avoided any such neighborhoods for that very reason), but our city dictates what we can do with our yard, from the height of the fence we're allowed to have, to the height of the grass, and to how much grass is in the yard.  Yes, there are zoning laws requiring a large percentage of a yard to consist of grass.

I live in Utah.  In the middle of a desert.

This isn't unique to my city either.  In the Salt Lake metropolitan area, there have been a number of incidences in various cities where people have ripped out their lawns and replaced them with appropriate desert landscaping with plants that require far less water and are more adapted to the summer heat than Kentucky bluegrass.  Consequently, they've been fined and otherwise harassed by city officials until they've had to put grass back in.  This is so ridiculous, especially with how we seem to be in drought conditions more often than not.  In the Southeast, where they've been having a drought for a while, they're not allowed to water their lawns in some places because of how much water it uses.  Yet in Utah, second only to Nevada as far as aridness goes in the U.S., if you let your grass die no matter what the reason, you can get in trouble with the law.

I don't understand why city officials think they have the right to butt in and dictate what my yard looks like.  I should have the right to do whatever I want with it within reason.  If we can't even get people to back off on a local level, do we really have a chance at influencing less intrusive policies at a state or national level?  Despite how important issues like universal healthcare are, perhaps we need to put more focus on changing the little things at home first.