The Animal Legal Defense Fund Public Registries
I recently got an email from the Animal Legal Defense Fund. They are pioneering legislation in California to make public animal abuse registries. In our opinion, this is a wonderful idea, and we wanted to help them spread the word. Here is the press release, which explains why they are trying to do this. Please take time to read it, and if you are in California, get in touch with your representative and encourage them to support this if you believe it’s a good thing.
COTATI, CALIF. – The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) today announced an effort aimed at creating public registries in each state of anyone convicted of felony animal abuse. This could include violence (torture, mutilation, intentional killings, etc.), sexual abuse, and animal fighting as well as neglect (such as hoarding). Such registries would help protect animals, pet guardians and communities by preventing repeat offenses from anyone with an established history of abusing animals.
Through its campaign, www.ExposeAnimalAbusers.org, the animal protection organization is promoting model legislation that state legislatures could enact. Such bills have been introduced in the past by elected officials in Rhode Island, Colorado, and Tennessee, and the first-ever bill for a statewide registry in California was today announced by its sponsor, State Senator Dean Florez.
ALDF points to the following examples for why a registry is needed to help animal guardians, law enforcement and shelters protect their animals:
- Robert Rydzewski: In 2004, the then 29-year-old upstate New Yorker shot his neighbor’s dog in the face twice. Two months later, he killed another neighbor’s Welsh Corgi with an ax. Rydzewski was convicted of “torturing or injuring” an animal, and he has since been arrested for assaulting people and resisting arrest. His whereabouts are unknown.
- Shon Rahrig: While living in Ohio in 1999, Rahrig allegedly adopted several cats and a puppy from local shelters and tortured them sadistically. He poked out the eyes of a cat named Misty, broke her legs and jaw, cut off her paws, and left her bleeding in a laundry basket. His girlfriend turned him in, and he took a plea bargain that admitted abuse of only one animal. Rahrig was forbidden to own an animal for five years, but he was subsequently seen at an adoption event in California.
- Vikki Kittles: Since 1982, Kittles has been run out of four states for hoarding animals. Time and again, she has been caught housing dozens of sick, neglected animals in squalid conditions. An Oregon prosecutor convicted Kittles in 1993 after finding 115 sick and dying dogs crammed into a school bus, but she has gone on to hoard animals again in Oregon and other states several times since.
“Animal abuse is not only a danger to our cats, dogs, horses, and other animals, but also to people, said ALDF Executive Directory Stephen Wells. “Many animal abusers have a history of domestic violence or other criminal activity, and there is a disturbing trend of animal abuse among our country’s most notorious serial killers.”
Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, David Berkowtiz (“The Son of Sam”), Albert DeSalvo (“The Boston Strangler”) and Dennis Rader (Kansas’ “BTK killer”) all abused animals before their other crimes, as did many of the teenagers who went on shooting rampages at their high schools: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (Columbine, CO), Luke Woodham (Pearl, MS) and Kip Kinkel (Springfield, OR).
“But it’s not just about how animal abusers end up also hurting or killing humans,” said Wells. “It should be motivation enough to protect our animals from repeat offenders – and any abuse of any kind.”
Through its campaign website, ExposeAnimalAbusers.org, ALDF allows the public to urge their state lawmakers to propose legislation for state registries.
While no state has passed a bill to date, a proposal in Tennessee is currently pending. In 2008, an earlier version of this bill passed the Tennessee Senate, but stalled in the House of Representatives. The current bill’s sponsors are Rep. Janis Sontany and Senator Doug Jackson.
“We operate shelters in the hopes of giving abandoned pets a second chance at a loving home, not subjecting them to lives of continued abuse and neglect,” Florez said. “A registry of abusers would help ensure animals are not being adopted out to convicted abusers, end the cycle of abuse and increase the likelihood of finding these pets the forever home they deserve.”
About the Animal Legal Defense Fund
ALDF was founded in 1979 with the unique mission of protecting the lives and advancing the interests of animals through the legal system. Visit www.aldf.org.
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Comments
Just for the record, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did NOT abuse animals. I keep reading this erroneous information over and over again in blog after blog and I don’t know where people are getting this from. It’s absolutely untrue. Neither Harris nor Klebold at any time ever expressed a desire to hurt any animal or ever said in writing or to anyone in person that they had ever done so. Harris, in fact, had stated on a number of occasions that he hated people but loved animals. He stated the following on his now defunct website (text is copied verbatim from news sources. I censored the one swear word.):
“YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!?
PEOPLE WHO ARE MEAN TO ANIMALS!!!!! The only promise I make in this whole page is this: If I ever see anyone on god’s green earth harm a dog or be mean or unkind to any mammal, I will SEVERELY hurt you, I swear to god, I swear on my computer, on my car, on my f*cking LIFE, I will hurt you.”
Does that sound like someone who ever abused animals? Harris hated people, yes, but he cared about animals. There has never been a single documented case of either Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold abusing or expressing a desire to abuse animals. Please correct your errors regarding this in the original post and in the future please do a little more thorough research before you continue to spread falsehoods and lies.
Regarding what Lisa wrote in her comment, and just FYI as well.
Please note that the press release in this post came from the ALDF. We rely on organizations to make sure that they have their facts correct in their press releases, as we don’t have time to try to verify them. If there is a fact that you feel is wrong, we encourage you to contact the organization directly. Thank you for understanding.
Aimee, well done! This is well presented and clearly highlights the need for this legislation.
One more important aspect: I am a candidate for the presidebncy of a major west coast shelter and one of my proposals is to do away with adoption fees. The huge objection to this is the concern over loss of control in the adoption process: anyone could then get their hands on these beautiful animals.
This is a valid concern. An effective prevention is the collection and dissemination of data between all members of a community’s rescue members. When an abuser is identified, that name gets passed around locally as a name to avoid. A law amndating this would make the exchange of data between law enforcement and local rescue workers so much easier. And it wouldn’t be restricted to just one part of a state.
Thanks so much for highlighting the ALDF’s work. This is very important to rescue groups and shelters across America.