Rare News Desk
If you think it’s ok to take a dog away from a young girl who is confined to a wheel chair, fine her family if they object, and then kill the dog—there may be a place for you in city government in Moreauville, Louisiana!
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Here’s why: The Moreauville city council voted to ban all Rottweiler and Pit Bull dogs from their city by December 1. The ban was supposedly needed because a handful of residents complained that several dogs of this type were running loose throughout town, though there aren’t any records of them actually attacking anyone.
Now, in a town small enough for everyone to know everyone else (Moreauville has fewer than 1,000 residents), common sense would suggest that there are plenty of neighborly ways to deal with loose pets that don’t involve legislation.
But common sense doesn’t seem to apply to Moreauville’s city government.
Not only were Rottweilers and Pit Bulls banned from the town, but any of these dogs already living there had to be gotten rid of. Owners who didn’t rehome their dogs—completely regardless of the dogs’ history of behavior—would have their pets taken by force and killed.
There are so many problems with this sort of legislation I’m not even sure where to begin.
While Rottweilers and Pits are indeed bred to be muscular, active dogs, they are no more inherently mean than any other dog (as anyone who has encountered an undisciplined Chihuahua biting their ankles well knows). Yes, an aggressive Pit Bull can do more damage than an aggressive Chihuahua, but so can an aggressive Labrador—and no one is suggesting we ban Labs. With any of breed, it is the owners who determine the dog’s behavior far more than genetics—and indeed research has demonstrated that breed-specific laws like the one in Moreauville do not result in decreased dog bite incidents.
It’s also frankly none of the government’s business what kind of dogs we own. To ban all dogs which look a certain way is a bizarre expansion of big government which is expensive and nearly impossible to enforce. Indeed, to preemptively incriminate animals before they’ve actually harmed anyone arguably sets a dangerous precedent of policing tendencies and intentions rather than actual crimes.
But perhaps the most significant problem with invasive legislation like Moreauville’s dog ban is the unintended consequences.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPReWYtd_2U&w=560&h=315]
In this case, they take the form of a dog named Zeus, a Pit Bull owned by a girl named O’Hara Owens, whose neck problems require her to wear a brace and use a wheelchair. Zeus has never been accused of any aggressive behavior, and he’s a huge comfort to O’Hara.
“If anything ever happened to him, I would just shut down,” she says, because Zeus is her soon-to-be official therapy dog. “I can sit here if I’m in pain, he comes and he notices it before I even make any noise.”
O’Hara’s parents have been fighting Moreauville’s government to keep their beloved pet alive and in their family, insisting they will not rehome the dog or surrender him to be killed. Thanks to an avalanche of media coverage leading to more than 300,000 petition signatures in Zeus’ defense, it looks like the Moreauville ban may indeed be overturned and Zeus will be saved.
That’s fantastic, but unfortunately most misguided legislation isn’t so easily vanquished, in large part because the unintended consequences aren’t nearly so obvious—and that’s what makes them even more dangerous.
When government enacts well-meaning regulations like banning smoking in restaurants (a law in many states, like Maryland), outlawing the sale of soda in giant cups (previously seen in New York City and now resurrected in California as a tax), or requiring school children to wear IDs which track their location at all times (as is now being done in Texas and California), it’s easy to see the intended good results.
Negative, unintended consequences are harder to identify. They often occur further in the future and affect a larger and more nebulous group of people than do the immediately obvious, planned outcomes:
For instance, restaurants may lose business if they’re no longer allowed to have a smoking section, and they may lay off workers as a result.
Banning or taxing the sale of large sodas may result in businesses simply making giant sizes free as part of a meal deal, enticing diners to consume even more calories at once.
And the microchip tracking programs for school children are a huge invasion of privacy which will cost taxpayers millions per year while potentially damaging children’s academic careers if the tracking data is used for more than just stopping kids from playing hooky.
Economic journalist Henry Hazlitt summarized the problem of unintended consequences more than half a century ago in a short book called Economics in One Lesson:
The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
While this certainly applies to economics, I’d suggest that it goes for politics as a whole.
Moreauville’s dog ban will likely be struck down because Hazlitt’s one lesson has been recognized—but the busybody government mindset behind it is a threat creeping far beyond the Moreauville city limits.
