Speak up about proposed new animal ordinances for the city/county

I know it has been some time since I posted something new to this blog, but I am going to start posting more to it in the next year, especially as important animal-welfare issues come to light in our community. Right now, we are at a crossroads concerning some new animal ordinances which were proposed this week (on Feb. 14, 2011) by a committee formed nine months ago to review the city/county ordinances and make improvements/suggestions. They were also tasked to make one set of ordinances instead of having two different ones, which makes sense. This was also a perfect opportunity to model our ordinances more closely to communities in the U.S. which are saving the most animal lives.
Because no animal-welfare nonprofit leaders were chosen for this committee except then-DACHS president Jake Sims, many of us were concerned about what would be proposed. Overall, the committee did a good job at a first set of suggestions, but there are alarming ommissions, such as a lack of support for TNR.
As a general rule, there are many model ordinances out there. We do not have to rewrite or start from the beginning; we need to do the research in order to borrow from the best of the best -- from those communities saving more than 95% of their shelter animals.
Though these laws are just the beginning, they set the tone for our citizens and our animal-welfare systems. We need to be careful with some laws that the majority of animal people here want, such as mandatory spay/neuter, because some of these laws can actually have either no effect at all or backfire when punitively enforced instead of used as incentive for people to do the right thing. With our lack to access to high-volume, low-cost spay/neuter and no-cost spay/neuter, a law like this would add more pressure to an already overburdened system.

Whatever your opinion, please speak up to the ASCMV (shelter) oversight board on the proposed ordinances. A copy of the proposed ordinances is available from the Home page of http://www.actionprogramsforanimals.org/. Also on this site are APA's suggestions for ordinance improvement and a complete list of the city/county leaders on the shelter oversight board.

Sign the petition to our leaders asking them to adopt TNR provisions via this link:
Support Community Cat Programs in LC/DAC