Canine Condition in Law and Politics

Canine Condition in Law and Politics
by: Wm Axsom

Since the technology has been around to do so, “microchip your dogs” has been all the hustle and buzz, right along with spay/neuter campaigns. Absolute standard expectations no matter where one goes. I support both policies, generally speaking, but like everyone else in the dog industry, I have my own mind relative to best practices in any given area of topic one cares to have a conversation about. Like so many others in these fields, it’s likely to feel more like a lecture than a conversation, however. Yes, microchipping your dog is a good thing, or at least a better than not thing. There are caveats for everything, and nowhere are those more conditional than in the canine industry as a whole.
That i.d. chip has about a 25% chance (depending on whose data one reads/accepts) of getting your animal identified and returned home. The more veterinarians in any given community, the likelihood is that the odds go down, not up, although there’s asterisks here too. The base issue is pretty simple, the wide variety of options, every brand has its own system, and good luck getting everyone on the same page, with anything. Chip reading
wand ‘A’ isn’t likely to recognize types ‘B’ through ‘Z,’ and so on down the line; if one thinks their local animal control can read every chip they otherwise might, someone is fooling themselves; there could be a handful or more types of chip systems operating in any given community, and each is blind to the rest. There is no concept of the variety of products among those who are deciding public policy for which chip readers the local animal control
department, and there are no ‘universal readers’ readily available, and costs are what drives everything. Before I paint an even more confusing issue that detours from the larger point, suffice it to say mass option availability is one of two things that are key drivers. The second is even more difficult to negotiate and navigate, and that is the complete dearth of unified standards across the board, in all things relative to the world of canines, and the
higher up the ladder one goes, the more confusing it tends to get. This is where backstory and context come into play, and without it there’s really no getting the larger issue(s) at play, and it isn’t a regulatory problem other than the deliberate efforts to prevent unified standards is the real story to tell.

Setting the Stage

Like a whole lot of other folks, I have taken the initiative to contact my elected officials on the issues within the industry. The absolute and complete dearth of any regulatory standards is choking the life out of far too many animals and the economics around it all are an embarrassment; there’s more money poured into keeping the status quo than in investing into the resolutions themselves, talk about ass backwards!

The whole mess of madness goes something like this.

Say you want to get a college degree in canine training and handling to pair with a certificate in Veterinary medicine as a vet tech, good luck, because saying it is all you’ll get, there are no such classes anywhere in the country, at all, bare none – full stop. (To be 100% accurate, there is a small local college in upstate N.Y. trying a program, but that’s it.) The next thing to ask is, well why not; I’ll get to that part, after the context is concluded.
Say someone very near to your life is severely injured, permanently disabled, and now needs a Service Canine to make life doable again, totally normal set of circumstances that happen every day. Once that investigation begins, here’s the first main factors one finds:
1.) Astronomical costs for a fully functional Service Canine from a well-accredited facility, the cost of a new/new-used vehicle, easily;
1.a) no insurance on the planet will cover any or reimburse the expenditure, it’s all
100% out of pocket.
1.b) TIME! How many months or years can any given case wait?
2.) Look for a qualified trainer, hopefully one with service dog experience and
credentials; what is found is a whole bunch of nothing nonsense. Who is actually credible, legitimate, affordable and experienced, all the right questions, yes?
2.a) Absolutely the right questions to ask, the problem is the complete absence of any means to discern such by; there doesn’t exist anywhere in the U.S.A. a governmental body of any kind with jurisdiction to establish, maintain, enforce a single standard of any kind, in any aspect, of any part of the pet/canine industry as a whole. None! Not one – anywhere! The bare minimum of “cruelty-free” standards is all that exist, and without a formal defining statute on defining “cruelty-free.”
Two different aspects coming into the same set of problems and circumstances are enough for base context, surely; a worthy third is prosecution of animal abuse offenders, as even it is influenced by the same set of circumstances.

Relative to “governing bodies” in the entire pet/animal | canine industry there are only a handful that exist enough to matter. There are a few breeder/kennel clubs such as the A.K.C.; a few sporting clubs still exist as well; ones specific to qualified, recognized, certified trainers, there are basically two, and for the sake of this piece, I am not even going to bother naming them. For the interim they are the “Alphabet Soup-Club,” each one is an acronym of about 6 letters, and I don’t want the distractions of them attached to this writing.
When I dig into something like this, I dig as deep as there is stuff to be dug up. When I looked into who the actual persons were, sitting on the board seats and things like that, suffice to say that what I saw didn’t ease my mind any, and it should have. I don’t have enough of anything to say or be anything more than suspicious, if one looks for it, one will find it; I think what is much more the reality is that there aren’t as many “high echelon” people for as much work as there is to be done, at those higher socio/political overlap zones. None of this really matters at the moment, it’s a latter dose of more context as it is anything else. Simply put, there simply are NO legally recognized, sanctioned, oversight, anything/nothing at any governmental
level to speak of; none that matter.

Per My Government Representatives

There are NO laws, rules, regulations relative to training or grooming standards.
There are NO laws, rules or regulations anywhere it might impede an individual’s
“right” to train, care for, or manage/handle their animals as their “beliefs” dictate.
Most laws in place are relative to LIVESTOCK management, “pets” have far less protections or governances than do animals for consumption.
Where there ARE Rules and Regs, there’s NO functional Investigative Power, little to no capacity to ENFORCE, and functionally zero incentive to Prosecute. It IS very EXPENSIVE to manage and control and fraught with disasters for the trying of it.
Once the regulation process starts, if it ever does, the grand finale` will be the judiciary having to make a ruling on the sentience of Canis – familiarous – full stop.
Once the protections and regulations start running through the various halls and levels of courtrooms, likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and kicked back to state-level legislations. Whatever the ruling relative to the minds of dogs will be the prescient ruling applied to ALL nonhuman life. It sounds like a trivial bovine-fecal matter, who determines and enforces the criteria by which dog trainers and handlers go about their work and the standards of those fields, and all the rest, it should not rest on the future wellbeing of the one species that defines “us” even
more than we live up to defining it of ourselves.
This is not hyperbole, this is the very real-deal reality we’re all stuck in right now. I’m not putting this down in the “I heard so-&-so say it from such-&-such,..“; NO, that is not it. I’m saying this is what was told to me personally on phone calls with our supposed elected representatives. If any of the 3 were alive today and could refute/declare on it, then I’d happily include them by name. This leaves that door open for other people to rattle the halls of government themselves and start demanding a unified code of recognized standards. Right now, it is very much a “good luck in wacked out world of service dogs.” And it absolutely should not be the case. Let’s push on now, to the final resolution, as this tail’s tale isn’t over.
Let’s say you’re the fortunate neighbor who could easily afford the best Service Canine the industry can provide, top tier coaching/training, the whole $100K package. Now, it’s 2 yrs later, family vacation in a B-n-B rental on the east coast 1167 miles from home; 4th of July family reunion, down on the beach; the disabled child and service dog in tow are suddenly assaulted by some unruly boys with their Black Cat ® firecrackers, the dog freaks out, breaks free and is gone in a flash; 2 hrs. later the busted harness is found tangled in a fence but the dog is gone.

ONLY a unified, national registry is capable of having a chance of returning these lost Service Canines as functionally and immediately as such a situation requires. This is why SDRA matters, or the equivocal to; based on a real story, b.t.w. Service Dog Registration of America isn’t a “scam”, no one is being tricked or fooledinto or by any of it; that’s the urban myth about such things. They’re entirely missingthe point. It is a choice made to participate in something that matters to those of us who do. They simply have zero idea about what is going on with the program; so, I’m sort of obligated to put out what I should be able to just keep to myself.
SDRA is trying to accomplish what no one else is, getting a nationally recognized registration for all service dogs. When one gets a dog from whatever given company, facility, or program, the records of that dog exist only as far and wide as the owner/handler and place/people the dog came from share that data – that’s it, no further. There isn’t a unified, functional, national, or even state, governmentally recognized registration database. For folks who don’t want to use one even if it exists, fine, cool, no problems at all. For those of us who do, that’s what and why we’re in, a part of, SDRA, which by the way, is recognized by one of the two Alphabet Soup Club members, so it isn’t some obscure, long-running scam. It is an active
outreach and socio/political nonprofit trying to mend a big hole most people don’t even know exists. If and when I start working with something like ‘Assistance Dogs of the West’, then it’ll that database used for any C.A.S.T.s that go through it.
For people who have no reason to know anything about service dogs aren’t likely to be looking for the resources available, or not, to those who do. Even a Home-Trained Service Canine ends up costing a lot more money than general pets, especially when one is doing it properly and well. Working dogs have different needs, it is as simple as that. All facilities and programs turning out dogs should have a commonregistry; S.D.R.A. has been around for a few decades now, and are serving many.