New Law Could Make You Spit, Hiss, Scratch and Bite

According to the paper, the County Board of Supervisors last week voted to impose licensing fees on all cats in the unincorporated areas of the county.

I am not immediately alarmed, since I live in the city, outside the new law’s purview. However, as goes the county, so may go the city; all jurisdictions love new sources of revenue.

The vote was 3 to 2, Mike Antonovich and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke dissenting. That means that my neighbor, Gloria Molina, voted for it.

Like me, of course, Molina is not affected, since she too lives in the city. I do not want to excite her wrath, having read that it can be excoriating indeed; but I must point out that I think her vote in this case is ill-advised, at best.

Were the law extended to the city, my wife and I would be in deep trouble. We have five cats. We do not actually own five cats; but we have five cats that live off our board. My wife feeds them every morning about 7 o’clock. They are always there on the front porch. Otherwise they are seldom seen.

They may enter the house at feeding time, if the door is left open, but they can not be shut in. They tear up the window blinds. They hang around outside the house in daytime; we have no idea where they stay at night.

The county law prescribes a $10 fee for cats that have not been neutered, $5 for those that have.

All our cats have been spayed. That is, one has been spayed and four have been castrated. I don’t want to get into that semantic bind again. They are three generations. They are the mama cat (the color of dirty black jeans); her son, a marmalade cat named Marmalade; and a later generation of three males, all solid black and nameless (we can’t tell them apart).

Our situation suggests to me that the county and the city (if it adopts such a law) are going to have a hard time enforcing it. How can they prove that our cats are ours?

How can we prove that they’ve been neutered? We have no papers. First, the authorities would have to prove that the cats belonged to us; then they’d have to catch them, one by one, and examine them to see whether they’d been neutered (if you can tell).

The county expects the fees to raise $200,000 a year, but I predict that enforcement would cost at least that much. We’d have cat people running up and down every street.

Unfortunately, I didn’t attend the meeting at which the vote was taken, but I can’t believe that one of the supervisors didn’t quote Adlai Stevenson’s famous veto of a law passed by the Illinois state Legislature requiring that cats be licensed and kept at home.

Stevenson’s veto was perhaps the most gracefully written state paper since the Declaration of Independence, thereby not only securing the liberty of cats but also elevating the quality of state prose.

The governor wrote, in part:

“I cannot believe that there is a widespread public demand for this law or that it could, as a practical matter, be enforced.

“Furthermore, I cannot agree that it should be the declared public policy of Illinois that a cat visiting a neighbor’s yard or crossing the highway is a public nuisance.

“It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming. Many live with their owners in apartments or other restricted premises, and I doubt if we want to make their every brief foray an opportunity for a small game hunt by zealous citizens--with traps or otherwise.

“I am afraid this bill could only create discord, recrimination and enmity. . . . Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in rural areas, in combatting rodents--work they necessarily perform alone and without regard for property lines. . . . “

The paper did not say that the new law required that cats be kept at home or on a leash, but if cats are to be licensed, it may prove necessary to restrain them, so that they can be counted.

Other jurisdictions, including apartment associations, have attempted to adopt laws requiring that cats be kept on a leash.

It is my conviction, despite the contrary assurances of cat trainers, that no cat can be kept on a leash.

As I have said before, if I tried to put a cat on a leash it would spit, hiss, scratch, bite, roll up into a ball, vomit on my leg; and, as an expert pointed out in a Discover magazine article, “if really irritated it will pee in your shoe.”

I hope the Los Angeles City Council, in its wisdom, will spare us any such contingency. They might as well tax coyotes and raccoons.