I don’t doubt it. The cute little dog looked distinctly anxious. Some pet owners are sufficiently affluent to be able to afford a dog tag with the name and number of the owners. The range of resources that could be brought to bear on keeping a pet safe is enormous.
As most of my readers will know, it is possible to insert a passive RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification tag, which is a tiny microchip that responds to a sensor with a code. It does not need any extra power; the power of the reader, or sensor, is all it needs to broadcast back its ID. To use this technology —which currently costs around $10 or less— a citizen must (1) be able to afford the gadget, (2) have access to a veterinary surgeon (or Vet) who is willing to insert the device safely, and to be able to afford his or her services, (3) be aware of the very existence of this sort of thing, by reading this Blog, or from similar educational sources, and lastly (4) care enough about their pet to do it.
It is difficult to tell why a pet ends up on the street. It is usually any one of: the home is not secure; the owner is too busy and distracted to keep track of the pet; the pet is such a nuisance that it is often banished to an area from which it is easy to escape; the pet has been thrown out of the family car, having become too much of a burden on the responsibilities of the family. Of course, the pet could wriggle out of its collar and make a run for it; pets often (or invariably) do not know what is good for them.
The RFID, if a pet has it, is only good if the pet is picked up by the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), also known as the Animal Shelter, or some similar institution which has the means of actually reading whether an RFID is present, in which case of course they can locate the owner of record. The pet could have met with any number of horrible fates instead of this most fortunate one.
Obviously, I don’t believe that poverty is a culpable crime; it is the crime of society itself that poverty exists. Bear in mind that poverty in America is extreme only in comparison to other developed countries. There is extreme poverty in Third World countries that is fueled by the needs of American Capital, compared to which the homeless in the US live like kings. But, the fact remains: even the poor should be allowed the satisfaction of owning a pet, provided the safety of the pet is supported by things that are easy to do.
In many localities, implanting an RFID, or obtaining a collar with an ordinary printed name-tag, is either free or subsidized. (This doesn’t help owners who don’t know about them; that’s an educational problem.) This is something which should be easy and inexpensive to remedy, but certain types of fiscal conservatives do not look upon this sort of initiative with favor. To pass a Federal Law that enables every locality to offer free or subsidized RFID on demand, it has to pass the test whether the government can afford to give every single pet in the US, numbering in the millions, obviously, one of those devices. Then, can it afford the bureaucracy that will be needed to get the plan working (which, Fiscal Conservatives suspect, involves putting countless undeserving imbeciles on the Federal payroll, and enabling a large number of unemployed to enter the ranks of the employed, and running the risk of countless numbers of Democrat votes that did not exist before)?
Helping keep pets safe is obviously a business fraught with unintended political consequences, and probably left alone, at least by a Republican Congress. But seriously, the number of conservatives whose reasoning follows this cynical path are probably very few. But they are in charge of the GOP machine.
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