11/03/2024
**UPDATE** While the litter license ordinance is still moving ahead, the meeting this Friday has been CANCELLED.** We will post when we hear it has been rescheduled.
Dekalb County friends, please show your support for the litter license. If it passes in Dekalb, hopefully, more counties will follow suit. Pet overpopulation is out of control.
**UPDATE** While the litter license ordinance is still moving ahead, the meeting this Friday has been CANCELLED.** We will post when we hear it has been rescheduled.
As many of you know, the situation at Dekalb County Animal Services, the third largest county in Georgia, has been dire, with extreme levels of shelter overcrowding and unchecked unethical breeding/selling of dogs.
The Dekalb County commissioners have been working behind the scene to develop policies, programs, and updated ordinances to try to improve the situation. Earlier this month, they passed an ordinance (like Athens-Clarke County has) to ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits at transient locations (like parking lots). (It does not affect the breeders selling from their residences or inside a business location but addresses the fly-by-night sellers who cannot be found when a purchased animal is sick and who are in almost all cases not properly licensed for breeding.)
They are also working on a first-in-the-state litter license ordinance. Litter license ordinances operate like hunting licenses: they require everyone engaging in the activity to obtain a license so that it is possible to identify the people who are acting illegally--poaching or breeding/selling illegally.
Law-abiding breeders--those not violating the prohibition on breeding and selling more than one litter in a twelve-month period without a state license--simply report the birth of a litter and are issued a unique identifier that then gets used in all ads and on all paperwork relating to the litter. Illegal breeders/sellers do not have this identifier and thus stand out, like poachers stand out since they don't have a license visible on them at all times while hunting.
The ordinances recognize what has been found to be true across various fields in many countries: If a regulation regime provides an exemption (like Georgia's one litter per year exemption to breeder licensing) but the person using the exemption does not need to give notice of their use of the exemption, there is widespread cheating.
Currently, *everyone* (literally everyone) caught selling without a license simply claims the current litter is their exempt one. Some are speaking truthfully. But the overwhelming number are lying. And there is no easy way to tell the difference without an ordinance like this one.
Litter licenses require that breeders (whether inadvertent, irresponsible, or responsible) simply provide notice upon birth of the litter that this is this breeder's exempt litter, like a license and tagging a deer show that a hunter is acting lawfully,
Next Friday, November 8th, at 9:30 am the Dekalb County Commissioners' Operations Committee is meeting to consider the proposed litter license ordinance.
A group that opposes the measure has been given time to speak at the meeting. Supporters will not have an opportunity to speak at it (prior meetings allowed time for the attorney hired to draft the ordinance, Claudine Wilkins, to present on it). As a result, supporters of the measure are asked to attend and wear RED SHIRTS to indicate their support of the measure. Please be quiet and respectful if you do attend.
Location: Maloof auditorium, 1300 Commerce Drive, Decatur, GA.
For more information about litter licenses and the problem they solve, read Milot, Lisa (2018) "Backyard Breeding: Regulatory Nuisance, Crime Precursor," Tennessee Law Review: Vol. 85: Iss. 3, Article 4.
