Headline of the day:
Order that Kasich rejected would have barred man from having exotic animals
Mukingum County farm owner had animal-cruelty conviction from six years ago
Weigel:
The story is true: [Ohio’s Democratic] Gov. Ted Strickland had signed an executive order restricting animal ownership to people without certain blemishes on their records. Gov. John Kasich, the Republican who beat him, judged this to be an overreach, so he scrapped it. The Columbus Dispatch finds that the issue, once ignored, stayed ignored:
Bill Damschroder, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources… said legislation was not in place that empowered the agency to do the things required by Strickland’s order. In addition, it allocated no resources to do the statewide enforcement job.
This is, in microcosm, the reality of the world Republicans yearn for — a world unfettered by government regulation in which, for example, convicted animal abusers are free to keep dozens of wild animals in captivity. After all, what business does the government have telling a felon convicted animal cruelty that he is unfit to keep wild animals?
The final paradox: Without smart regulations up front, when the worst happens, as it did here when the owner of the animals set them free and then killed himself, it falls to the government — taxpayer-funded law enforcement — to resolve the matter.
In this instance, the resolution was the slaughter of dozens of large, exotic animals, including as many as 18 rare Bengal tigers.
It compounds this tragedy to know that it needn’t have happened.
