A Pennsylvania Republican introduced a non-binding resolution yesterday to put the House on the record against the gassing of stray cats and dogs.
Rep. Lou Barletta hopes that his resolution will bring needed public attention to “this cruel manner of euthanizing an animal” that still happens in many jurisdictions, including in his home state.
“This is a cruel way to euthanize an animal,” Barletta said. “Sometimes the poor cat or dog is not completely euthanized and it suffers terribly. It’s a horrible practice. I’ve even seen videos where the exhaust from a vehicle is used to try to euthanize an animal.”
Barletta consulted with The Humane Society of the United States on the issue of gas chamber euthanasia before drafting the resolution.
“As a pet owner who considers our dog and two cats an important part of our family, I find it horrific that an official who can’t locate an animal’s owner could take the dog or cat to a facility where it could be gassed,” the congressman said. “This is unconscionable in the United States in the 21st century.”
What’s unconscionable is a Congressman thinking this is the business of the United States Congress.
Rep. Lou Barletta needs to go back to high school civics class.
Which means he should probably resign from Congress and run for a state rep. job if he is this concerned about the issue.
I find it hard to believe that any representative ran on this issue, therefore, in the strictest senses of the term, any such resolution will be the sense of Congress *alone*, 535 personages doing as is their wont–trying to rule the nation in all things great and small, to the finest detail and greatest degree–and not a sense of the people themselves, who probably have not considered the matter one way or the other.
This is a matter for the states. If, say, the twelve of millions in Pennsylvania or thirty of millions in California cannot by themselves render a correct verdict on such an issue when they are much closer to the actual facts on the ground, with the local legislators more intimately familiar with the matters at hand; and being both more numerous and better enabled to manage a local task than a national legislature–if the people in their own neighborhoods cannot manage their own strictly local affairs, why then do we somehow think they are nevertheless fit to make rules for other areas of the nation about which they know *nothing*?
If the citizens of a state cannot be trusted to keep their own house in order, why then should they be trusted to have a say in how other people’s houses are run, via Congress? Because it has been shown that the people somehow manage to elect to Congress a uniquely superior breed of statesmen? Please. Enough of this stuff. If Congressmen want to be state legislators, then they should go and be state legislators and leave the rest of us be. Let the people learn to depend upon themselves and their state to ameiliorate most of what ails them, and let the national Congress focus on what it alone can and should do–things of true national significance that cannot be handled by 50 state legislatures doing the same thing.
HSUS is a radical organization that places animal rights above human rights.
Barletta is a fool, and a tool.
With Republicans like these…