Because Arkansas is a farming state that relies on commercial livestock for broad livelihood, the state cannot possibly issue licenses and make inspections at dog-breeding operations, sometimes called "puppy mills."
You see.
You do? Well, I don't. I was meaning to be ironic.
One thing strikes me as having absolutely nothing to do with the other. These are apples and oranges, by which I mean cows and puppies.
Cows graze. Pigs slop. By general understanding, they are burger-bound and bacon-bound. I feel sad about the demise awaiting them, but demise awaits us all.
Their deal is on the up and up and I enjoy their flavor.
That is to say cows and pigs exist for a regulated commercial purpose. My Lab Lilly and my beagle Roscoe exist for my personal pleasure and companionship. They are domesticated dogs--or at least Lilly is. They and their kind were developed for the very purpose of providing the friendship some of us wouldn't enjoy otherwise.
So every few days we hear in the news of an animal-breeding operation, a "puppy mill," that has been discovered abusing dogs in our state. It turns out the dogs are kept in inhumane conditions and bred at veterinary-disapproved rates.
A perfectly conservative freshman Republican state representative from Little Rock, Jim Sorvillo, put in a perfectly reasonable bill.
He said most other states regulated dog breeders and that it seemed to him that the bad actors sought haven in unregulated Arkansas.
His bill would have required registration and authorized state inspections of such facilities. Just as you and I must get a license to drive a car and then stand susceptible to radar speed guns, a person in the business of breeding dogs for bucks would have to get a license and stand susceptible to the state's occasional visit.
The Arkansas Farm Bureau lobbied against the bill and resisted overtures to work to make the bill palatable. The bureau apparently fears that any additional animal protections in law amount to a slippery slope that, in time, will have PETA in here arresting cattle ranchers.
Hunting groups wanted to exempt hunting-dog breeders. There was talk of an exemption for greyhound breeders.
State agencies resisted getting the oversight authority. The Veterinary Board doesn't have enough people. The Livestock and Poultry Commission doesn't do pets, thank you very much. And so forth.
Newly elected Republican legislators were saying their mandate was to shrink government, not put it in the kennel-regulating business.
There were supposed complications in how to define the regulated operations for purposes of registration. By numbers of dogs? How many, then? By gross sales? Of what amount, then?
All of that is to explain that Sorvillo pulled down his bill Friday in the Senate Agriculture Committee, a Farm Bureau-dominated panel where the bill did not belong in the first place, because he was going to lose.
He says he'll be back with a better bill next time if the voters are kind enough to re-elect him.
All those objections amounted merely to noise, to racket, distorting a simple fact: Your Legislature refused to require commercial dog-breeders to get a license and submit to a simple inspection.
Remember that the next time you see on the local news about a raid on some such facility and the rescue of filthy and malnourished puppies.
But we have the new animal-cruelty felony law, say the Farm Bureau and legislators. The Farm Bureau says it cooperated on that, and thus has cooperated sufficiently already.
And we're finding the cruelty already, aren't we? Cases are on local television news every other night, aren't they?
Yes, but what we lack is a regulatory system to keep abusers from seeking haven here in the first place. And what we lack is a simple inspection system by which the state would seek to prevent abuses before they showed up on your TV.
That's like offering this argument: We have laws against speeding, so why bother with radar guns and police patrols?
None of that has the remotest thing to do with farming and commercial livestock. And there is no slope, slippery or otherwise, leading the long arm of the law from mills abusing puppies to open ranges where cows graze and horses run, or to pig farms, whether in or out of the Buffalo River watershed, that are otherwise specifically licensed by state and federal agencies.
The fact is that the state would protect puppies much better if they offered better flavor.
Sometimes Arkansas can be a cruel and unusual place.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/26/2015