WISCONSIN HERPETOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Additional talking points to include in your communications to your legislators and DATCP:
1. This is the Yvonne Bellay Job Security Act! She already makes ~$100,000/year. The estimated 6-8 additional state inspectors that will be hired to enforce PFL will fall under her supervision and result in a promotion and salary increase due to the additional responsibilities. It should be against the law as a conflict of interest for any government employee to use their position and time to orchestrate a lobbying committee to enact legislation that engineers their own career advancement and salary increases. This is actually the FOURTH TIME PFL has been thrown at us! When is enough enough? While welfare queens like Yvonne Bellay slurp at the public trough of an overpaid salary, overly generous state benefits and permanent job security at public expense and use their public positions to push for legislation that directly benefits themselves, the rest of us that are harmed by this legislation have to take time off of work to testify at public hearings, contact legislators, and organize against this intrusive and oppressive legislation. After a while it starts to seem not only like harassment, but actual persecution. Enough is enough! A bill that fails twice needs to be dead forever. Lawmakers have a responsibility to their constituents to defend them against this type of perpetual harassment. Since the current holder of the position of State Humane Officer (Yvonne Bellay) feels it is appropriate to take an instrumental role in advancing new legislation, perhaps it needs to be taken one step further. Ask your state legislators to make State Humane Officer an elected position, so that when a lemon of an animal rights extremist gets the job, as is the case now, there is a public vehicle for replacing the officeholder with someone more in line with reality.
2. This one-size-fits-all legislation, which Ms. Bellay says she copied from a Colorado law, does a disservice to the diversity of animal enterprises in WI. 25 pit bulls is not equivalent to 25 bearded dragons or kingsnakes. It is absurd that someone with a pair of bearded dragons that produces more than 25 hatchlings/year should have to have their home licensed and inspected by state law enforcement agents. Ms. Bellay is far too overpaid to have to resort to copying another states laws. For her $100,000, she should be imaginative enough to come up with something a bit more original and appropriate. Anything less is a disservice to the citizens that pay her salary.
3. Supporters of PFL claim it will result in more tax revenues for the state of WI, allegedly because inspectors will be able to access sales records of breeders and report discrepancies to Dept. of Revenue. In actuality, it will result in less tax revenue reported and collected because breeders who refuse to be licensed will conceal sales and alter sales records, or sell out of state, or for cash only in the underground economy to fall under the 25 animal cutoff in order to avoid the licensing requirement.
4. In this Pay to Play cash economy of the state legislature and congress, our public officials accepted bribes and have enacted economic policies, written by industry lobbyists, that resulted in the loss of millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico, the fall of the labor union movement, and class warfare against the middle class. The rich that write the laws and pay off the politicians get richer and conceal their incomes and tax liability in off-shore accounts while the rest of us are squeezed to the breaking point. When we try to help ourselves and create our own jobs and cottage businesses, we are squeezed again by legislation such as this. It is time to just say NO!
5. DCHS, or any other single county humane society, does not belong in this fight. DCHS initiated this legislative committee to change state laws over a recent case in which they ended up with 50 impounded pit bulls and are incurring large expenses in housing these dogs. This is the result of their contract with Dane County. Their fight is negotiating a contract with Dane County that works for them. This is not a state matter and has nothing to do with state laws. In any initiative on changing state laws, the involved parties are the private citizens of Wisconsin that will be affected by these laws, and DATCP, the enforcement agency. Meetings need to rotate to locations all over the state and be held on weekends to allow the affected persons to be able to attend and influence the process. It is the job of DATCP personnel to attend at any location at any time. They are OUR public servants. We have no obligation to make this process convenient for them by always meeting in Madison.
6. DATCPs publicly stated rationale for supporting PFL is that the current staff of city and county humane officers, employed by municipalities and county humane societies all over the state, are overworked and unable to address all the cases of animal neglect and abuse, and therefore PFL license revenues are necessary to fund additional inspector positions to ensure that animal cruelty laws are obeyed. This may be true during the summer months, but is definitely not true during the winter. At previous PFL hearings, city of Madison animal control officers (ACO) testified that during the winter months, there are very few animal incidents they can address. Because people and their pets spend most of the time indoors, there are fewer dogs at large, negative dog-human interactions (bites), etc that they spend most of their time addressing during nice weather when dogs and people are outside and interacting a lot of the time. During the winter ACOs report spending most of their time in their offices reading and wasting time out of boredom, or sitting in their vans in parks looking for whatever few pet violations occur. They said that during the winter they would have time to inspect every pet store, boarding kennel and every other commercial animal facility in Dane County ten times over. The current ACO/humane officer staff in municipalities around the state are clearly being underutilized and their boring winter months could clearly be used to inspect commercial pet facilities for animal cruelty violations without the additional bureaucracy PFL would create.
If you have any additional questions on this matter, send an email to:

wireptileshows@hotmail.com

Permission to duplicate, distribute and cross-post is granted.
Ed Stone, Wisconsin Herpetological Society.