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Letter To Editor

This is a letter that was written to the editor of the Jacksonville Daily News regarding a proposed assessment on pet food.

To the Editor:

Your editorial on the miniscule pet food assessment (or tax, as you call it) proposed by the NC legislature missed one very, very important detail - North Carolina taxpayers are ALREADY paying ridiculous amounts for animal "control" that doesn't control anything, including the ever-increasing costs involved.  Euthanasia-based animal control as it is practiced across NC is incredibly expensive and for all the money it costs us, IT DOESN'T EVEN WORK!

Thousands more animals are born every year and thousands more are rounded up and killed at taxpayer expense, and the tax burden this perpetuates is insane - over $25 MILLION spent each year according to the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services!

THIS is what the Daily News should be writing about.  This and the fact that in 2001 and 2002 Onslow County taxpayers, for example, paid $822,454 to trap, transport, house and sort 14,526 abandoned cats & dogs, eventually killing 9,919 of them.  7,651 more cats and dogs were left at the Onslow shelter in 2003.  We leave you to imagine at what cost.

When a simple 44 cents to a few bucks per year in additional pet food costs can raise $4-8 million/year to bring affordable spay-neuter surgeries to those who need it, saving taxpayers many times that amount over time, the Jacksonville Daily News should have been urging its readers to READ and support the proposed bill.  It would have given Onlsow, Craven and Carteret County each many tens of thousands of dollars/year in spay-neuter funds, and the Onlsow, Carteret and Craven shelters could have received up to $25,000/year each in shelter-improvement grants.

Euthanasia-based animal control as it is being practiced across North Carolina is nothing but a taxpayer-financed welfare program for irresponsible pet owners, and we ALL pay for it!  Irresponsible pet owners have litter after little and dump innocent animals at the shelters, and pet owning and non-pet owning taxpayers pay for it.  Irresponsible pet owners let their hormone-driven animals roam unsupervised, and, yes, all the taxpayers pay for it.  The nastiest of these people abuse and fight their animals, and who pays to clean this up?  Again, the taxpayers.

Well, its time for a change, and I applaud anyone willing to help make it happen.  National studies have proven:  for every municipal dollar spent on targeted spay-neuter, 3-4 tax dollars are saved in animal control costs.

To those of you who protested the proposed bill, did you read even a single one of its 21 pages?  Or did you fall for the sound-bites of special interest groups willfully distorting the facts to support their personal objectives at the cost of the general taxpayer?  Well, folks, ignorance is NOT bills.  Ignorance is pretty stupid, actually.  It is also very, very expensive.  Not all "taxes" are created equal.  Some, like this one, would actually save large amounts of taxpayer money in only a matter of a few years.  Without, you're all going to CONTINUE to pay.

TWO TAX WATCHDOGS WHO ARE NOT WAGGING THEIR TAILS