Jan 17

Mess With Me, Fine. Mess With My Dog, Now We’ve Got Problems

Say Uncle and Rachel both just emailed me about this piece of legislation that’s got me so angry I have half a mind to take Mrs. Wigglebottom down Charlotte and make Senator Tommy Kilby tell me to my face while looking at her, that he’s fine with taking her from me.

I don’t know how we ensure this never gets out of committee, but we’ve got to do it. Tell me, folks what can be done and I’ll be at the capitol doing it.

Can I trade him my right hand for her? My kidney? I’ll give him a kidney if he lets me keep my dog. That’s a more than fair trade as far as I’m concerned.

Say Uncle has the details, which I’m reprinting in part here:

You can contact Tommy and let him know that breed specific legislation is pointless at:

District Address
118 Henry Heidel Lane
Wartburg, TN 37887

Nashville Address
10A Legislative Plaza
Nashville, TN 37243-0212
Phone (615) 741-1449
Fax (615) 253-0237
Staff Contact: Nadine Korby, Jeremy Davis, Research Analyst

Or email him here Sen. Tommy Kilby

Edited to Add:  Here’s the legislation in question.

12 thoughts on “Mess With Me, Fine. Mess With My Dog, Now We’ve Got Problems”

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  3. Its a stupid bill. Breed specific bans have all kinds of problems associated, like determining what a certain dog actually is. Better to impose heavy fines on those who do not properly restrain their animals, of any breed.

  4. Pingback: Music City Bloggers » Blog Archive » Sen. Tommy Kilby, Your Phone Is Ringing

  5. Pingback: SayUncle » BSL in Tennessee

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  8. This seems to be a continuation of the sort of, hm, hierarchical sorting mania that we seem to have as a country. Instead of talking carefully about behaviors and consequences, and dealing with situations, we seem to prefer dealing with classes of people (or, in this case, dogs).

    It’s not that our immigration process is fucked up, or that there aren’t good sets of choices available, or that we have to decide what to do with people who do X, Y, and Z in a way that addresses X, Y, and Z, it’s that they’re illegal and we have to get rid of them. It’s not that women and girls are winding up with unwanted pregnancies, dangerous pregnancies, or wanted pregnancies gone wrong, it’s that there are bad people and we should get rid of them take away their rights. It’s not that some types of dogs are likely to be mistreated, or that dogs that are mistreated often assault people and need to be dealt with, it’s that there are bad dogs and we need to get rid of them.

    (That’s not to say that the specifics of any of these cases are commensurable. Rather, the point is that the same shift in logic keeps being made. Rather than dealing with the situation, or the dynamics, or the causes, we seem to be bound and determined to make it a categorical fault of whatever group we deem scapegoatable.)

    Going back to the specific ban, I wonder… what if it were, for some reason, effective? What if people stopped owning “bad dogs” (for whatever value of dog you put in there)? That wouldn’t stop people who abuse animals from doing it, nor would it stop people who like to bet on animal fights from doing so.

    What happens if people start raising ‘pit chows?’ Chows are already pretty vicious and relatively large; you could train them to fight fairly easily. Would we ban chow ownership as well? What if people wanted to cockfight? Or hell, to use an example from Veronica Mars, to hobo fight? It’s silly, sure, but it seems pretty obvious that the problem is with the actual bad behavior (training things to fight in the specific manner that we’re dealing with, mistreating their animals so that they’re vicious, etc.), rather than the condition of dog-owning itself.

  10. What happens if people start raising ‘pit chows?’

    Magni, I was going to bring up just that point. There are some breeds that probably can’t be trained to fight, but I’m ready to bet that just about every breed of hound could be, if the owners wanted them to fight. Are they going to ban hunting dogs next?

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