Yesterday I wrote about Kansas City, KS' animal control driving through neighborhoods and knocking on doors looking for unaltered dogs to ticket people under the city's mandatory spay/neuter ordinance.
While it all seems really bad when you see it happening, I think it's important to put what they're doing into some context....and when you do, their actions seem even worse.
Six weeks ago there was another story about KCK animal control. The story involved the mother of a 10 year old boy that was bitten multiple times by a neighbor's dog. It seems the boy was chased by the dog, then bitten in the leg and in the back. Paramedics at the scene recommended stitches to the young boy and the mother had to take her son to the hospital. However, she went to the local tv station when she became frustrated that animal control would not come out and even talk to the dog owner. The mother said at one point the animal control officer told her he 'didn't feel like dealing with it tonight."
Nice.
According to the mother:
"I don't feel like there's been any real concern over my 10-year-old son being attacked by a dog."
So while animal control feels like it can go around and look for unaltered animals, the limited staff doesn't feel like it is important to go deal with biting dogs.
Meanwhile, as many in the comments yesterday pointed out, a local humane organization is trying helping KCK with the MSN sweeps in hopes of keeping pets from entering the shelter....although KCK has MORE than enough ordinances that are causing them to enter the shelter - -including the MSN, but also a ban on 'pit bulls' and also a pet limit of no more than 2 dogs (which is bad without taking into account that a fair amount of the county is fairly rural).
When put in perspective, the KCK sweeps become even more ridiculous -- as they seem to be all about punishing low-income pet owners, but could care less about dogs biting children.
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