Va. Bureaucracy Is Foaming at the Mouth Over Dogs

N FL quarterback Michael Vick and his friends operated their "Bad Newz Kennels" dogfighting operation in southeastern Virginia for six years before authorities caught up with them, according to the federal indictment of the Atlanta Falcons star.

But it's not as if the state of Virginia has been ignoring pooch problems for all those years. No, while Vick and company were allegedly staging bloody fights and executing dogs that didn't deliver peak performances, your state government was hard at work creating the bureaucracy necessary to attack the social scourge of dangerous dogs.

Horrified by the maulings of a toddler and an 82-year-old woman a couple of years ago, lawmakers in Richmond voted almost unanimously to create a Virginia Dangerous Dog Registry, which a state government news release informs us is "similar in concept to the Sex Offenders Registry."

The registry -- an online listing, complete with owners' names and addresses, of dogs found to have attacked a person or a dog or cat -- debuted July 1 ( http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/animals/dogs.shtml). It contains photos and information about a grand total of nine dogs. The new law requires two pictures of each dangerous dog to be posted, including "one front view and one side view head to paw."

Just one of those dogs -- a black, female, 7-year-old, 59-pound Labrador mix named Cody -- is in Northern Virginia. Cody, it seems, bit a neighbor in the shin, leaving a bruise. Cody's owners, Kevin and Jennifer Packard of Ashburn in Loudoun County, have described the dog as "calm and lazy."

But under Virginia's new state law, Cody must wear a special "dangerous dog" tag and an orange "danger" collar whenever she goes out of the house. The dog must also be leashed and muzzled. In addition, the family must display a "dangerous dog" sign in its window and buy a $100,000 liability insurance policy on the dog. All this remains in effect "until proof of death of the animal," the new law says.

(So now we can expect the state to get into the pet death certificate business, too? Oh, goody -- maybe we can get a whole new state agency to handle that.)

Naturally, before legislators agreed to set up this registry, they looked into the potential costs of such regulations. The state planning and budget department said it would cost $200,147 to set up the registry, plus $78,302 a year to operate it -- and the cost of jailing those who violate one of the four new crimes created by the law.

It's not their money, so the lawmakers voted 38 to 0 in the Senate and 93 to 4 in the House to charge ahead with the registry.

Without question, there are bad dogs out there and some even worse owners. And nobody should have to live in fear of a neighbor's uncontrolled animal. But is a registry the right tool for the government to wield against this particular social ill? A sex offenders' registry shines light on something that people try to keep secret -- their disgusting and dangerous criminal records. The problem with dangerous dogs is not finding out where they are, but getting something done about them, and the registry isn't of much help there.

Public shaming is an underused tool in our oh-so-sensitive times, but if the state is going to expand its use of online registries to change public behavior, surely there are more appropriate targets. Lawmakers who really want to win reelection are advised to get to work on bills creating registries listing: