Ohio Republican Governor Rescinded Regulation That Would Have Prevented Slaughter of Dozens of Exotic Animals
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?
