Obama Hires Dog AttorneyFollow

This is what this nut wrote in his book




This is the judgement of the leader you liberal democrats elected. Don't **** your dog off some govn appointed attorney will be there to represent the dog against you.

WOW!

I, for one, welcome our new canine overlords.

Elephant,

So who are going to be the dog gestapo determining whether someone is treating the dog humanely? Can the dog be called on to testify?

Man these liberals are f*cking crazy.

In Australia there are laws against this type of thing:



Over here the RSPCA is responsible for seeing that farm and pet animals are treated humanely. But they don't get around to all cases. People can report suspect incidents to the RSPCA. I presume this idea of his is another way of people being able to intervene on behalf of clearly ill-treated animals, in the cases where the relevant authorities are not keeping up.

You might be interested to know that this sort of thing used to go on in Medieval courts. Lawyers would go in to bat for hives of bees, or a heard of pigs, when a farmer's or a village's practices disturbed their food sources or shelter too much. In many ways those cases were very early examples of environmental or humane-treatment-of-animals laws.

Huh, didn't realize he had come up with two theories I happen to like quite a bit: availability cascades, and cyber balkanization.

Availability cascading is the phenomenon of ideological snowballing. It explains a few things - why social theories like idiocracy catch on quickly, and why talking points work. A buzz catches on; everyone seems to be in agreement; and it's tempting to just accept the common opinion as fact and forgo analysis altogether.

Cyber balkanization is the phenomenon of surrounding yourself with those who agree with you, specifically on the Internet. Gbaji argues that this happens here, with us lefties. He may be right; it's hardly limited to here and now, though. It takes effort to consider opposing view points.

Those sound like some easily won lawsuits. Hell, they'd probably be so easily won that you could counter-sue the other party for costs.

Is it really insane to make legislation that gives a living thing the right to humane treatment? Really?

It can be. If you don't carefully define what is a living thing worth humane treatment and what is 'humane'. Without which, windshields would all be jailed for mistreatment of insects.

I read most of the relevant chapter from the book in question and can't say I'm too distraught. His main points seem to be that:

(A) Enforcement of animal cruelty laws are entirely up to public prosecutors, meaning that cases go overlooked or ignored due to caseloads (in this and other areas). This could be reduced by allowing private citizens to bring suit in cases where the violation of the law was unambiguous (his word). There's a question to be raised about how you determine the unambiguous nature but we're discussing theory here, not creating legislation.

(B) Cruelty laws are spread across the books and jurisdictions instead of being centrally codified. Laws that prohibit me from starving my cat are completely different from the laws prohibiting starving a dairy cow. The laws prohibiting starving a dairy cow are completely different from the laws prohibiting starving a lab rhesus monkey. In fact, if a cop came to my house to remove my starving cat, he'd have no jurisdiction to remove my starving dairy cow. Even without changing the threshold for "abuse", changes need to be made to make the law evenly enforcable.

Sunstein, in starting the chapter, actually states that he isn't for massive overhauls or expansions to animal rights but rather making moderate changes which would allow the existing laws to be properly and evenly enforced.

But, yeah... "dog attorney". I guess that soundbites better for the simple-minded.

He won't be writing legislation, either. But this ignores the point that I'm not against what he proposes, just admitting that for purposes of the book it's not an airtight bit of law but rather thoughts on how animal cruelty laws can be improved/enforced.In an unambiguous case? Sure.