Assembly Bill 1634, the California bill that will require any dog or cat over the age of four months to be spayed or neutered unless the owner qualifies for and obtains an intact animal permit, passed the California State Assembly.
Pet overpopulation is a huge problem--but this bill is not the answer:
How will this law be enforced?
Animal control officers aren't going to go door-to-door, looking for unaltered animals. Even though it's possible to determine if a male dog is altered just by looking (and even then, you could claim "neuticles"), you can't necessarily tell without surgery if a bitch is spayed or not. You're going to make everyone take their female pet in to open her up and see if she has her uterus?
People who don't want to comply simply won't
Whether because they can't afford it, or because they have more nefarious intentions (like dogfighting) a lot of people probably are already "underground" and either don't license their dogs or lie on the application.
Responsible breeders will be punished.
The hallmark of a responsible breeder is that he/she does all testing before breeding and is ALWAYS willing to take any of his/her dogs back if the placement doesn't work out. Responsible breeders are NOT contributing to the pet overpopulation problem--if they are, they are not responsible breeders, and please spare me any argument about "their puppies are taking the place of dogs that would otherwise be adopted from shelters." People want what they want, and if they want a puppy of a particular breed, they will look to get it--they won't be getting a mix from a shelter. Irresponsible breeders will do what they want without adequate testing and without obtaining the "breeding permit" from the state.
The bill shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how unwanted pets end up in shelters in the first place.
According to a study by the National Council on Pet Population and Policy, the top ten reasons pet animals are relinquished:
DOGS
- Moving
- Landlord issues
- Cost of pet maintenance
- No time for pet
- Inadequate facilities
- Too many pets in home
- Pet illness(es)
- Personal problems
- Biting
- No homes for littermates
CATS
- Too many in house
- Allergies
- Moving
- Cost of pet maintenance
- Landlord issues
- No homes for littermates
- House soiling
- Personal problems
- Pet illness(es)
- Inadequate facilities
With the possible exception of "too many pets in home", none of the reasons have anything to do with overbreeding. Some of the reasons, from our perspective, may seem stupid (what state, exactly, doesn't take pets?) and at the shelter I volunteered at I personally ended up taking entirely too many pets due to "moving to an apartment that doesn't allow pets" (why do that if you really want to keep your pet?) but let's face it--a lot of animals end up in shelters because for whatever reason, their owners could no longer handle them. And those animals may end up unadoptable.
Which brings us to
Many of the animals that end up in shelters are there for a reason--overbreeding is NOT that reason
There are plenty of "lovely, healthy, adoptable animals" at the shelters. Yeah. Depending on what you want.
At the no-kill shelter I used to volunteer at in Illinois, we had a LOT of animals that required (1) no kids due to overly active/not used to children/too young for a family with children or (2) no men or (3) no other pets in household or (4) chronic medical problems that had to be managed or (5) required that someone be home all day due to separation anxiety or (6) could not be declawed (in the case of cats) and on and on and on. Some of the dogs were just too big. ANY small dog we got in, no matter the age, went to a new home almost immediately (the oldest I personally did an adoption for was a 12-year old Yorkie). Medium-sized dogs went quickly too. You can do a certain amount of education with people who wanted to adopt dogs, and we did, but it was significantly different with the cats. Cats more than 2 years old sat for a long time, especially during kitten season when the shelter was just overflowing with kittens.
Being a no-kill shelter, we pulled from the kill shelters first, tried to get as many purebreds as we could into rescue groups, and last took owner give-ups. The shelter tried to screen carefully, and always took back animals it adopted out--but sometimes things just didn't go as hoped. Some animals got a LOT of chances, but some did end up having to be euthanized for behavior problems (usually biting).
Sorry, this got rambling. The point is that people want what they want for a reason--and if they can't get a dog or cat of a particular type from a local shelter, or don't think they can, they'll go somewhere else--so attempting to reduce the supply of pet animals by putting tough restrictions on breeding isn't necessarily going to mean more animals getting adopted from shelters. Putting more restrictions on breeding isn't going to keep irresponsible people from breeding. All it's going to do is make it more difficult for responsible people to breed, and make it more difficult to educate the irresponsible or just plain ignorant.
So what to do?
I think the SMARTEST thing is to make people aware of the dangers and responsibilities of breeding their beloved pets; fully fund low-cost spay/neuter (and make it easy for people to get their pets to low-cost spay/neuter programs); stricter enforcement of leash laws; more spay and release for feral cat populations (that's where a lot of kittens come from); and perhaps other programs that could be done on a case-by-case basis. I also think that breed rescues and shelters should work together more closely, refer each other back and forth, participate in joint appearances (this does happen in a lot of localities). And I think that shelters and rescues should both be more realistic about the adoptability of the animals they take in.