A Response to Kay Simpson of Arkansas

That would be the Kay Simpson who is mentioned in this article from the Arkansas Times. She says that she is literally crying now that the felony animal abuse law passed in Arkansas. She is crying because she doesn't have the resources as head of the Pulaski County Humane Society to conduct a bust of that kind. The law allows law enforcement to "raid" a breeder and it allows devices to avoid any kind of due process of the law.

The American judicial system is supposed to be based on the concept of "guilty until proven innocent." In other words, the accused is required to be allowed full due process of the law. This law has a provision that is as hostile as it gets towards that due process. If a person is accused of mistreating the animals that they own, they have to post some kind of bond, a percentage of the estimated cost of keeping the animals, or lose ownership of those animals. The way that Kay Simpson puts it, most of the owners then "abandon" such animals. What actually happens in many cases is that the shelters get a fresh supply of purebred dogs with many puppies that can be sold out the door in as little as four days, only they call the price tag an "adoption fee."

This way they can scatter a breeder's inventory and make it unrecoverable. Since they also surgically sterilize most of the dogs, they have made that inventory worthless to the breeder. We don't just have a right to breed dogs when the Humane Society feels like letting us, it's a basic human right. What you might call overly strict enforcement is actually a deliberate failure to allow due process of the law before taking property. It is a deliberate attack against a breeder that they want to shut down and I'm building a long list of dirty tactics that are used to do this.

If someone is deprived of the opportunity to do this, too bad. The felony law should never have been passed because its only use is going to be to extort money and property. All authorities involved in this are liable under section 1863 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 and the courts still take that Civil Rights Act seriously, at least some of them. Every jurisdiction involved in such busts should know that they may soon be liable for extremely large lawsuits. There should also be criminal penalties and we don't have to be particularly creative to do that. The threat of force under color of law to get property away from people is extortion. Police have gone to jail for it before and hopefully they will again. Also, there is the taking of property for public use without just compensation. It doesn't matter if they immediately destroy that property, the "taking" is in the denial of the use of that property to its owner.

People are slowing down their donations to the shelters in part because the shelter system has proven itself unworthy of the donations by supporting these laws. Kay Simpson should count herself lucky that she can't drive around making a reputation for herself by violating the rights of citizens. She could count herself lucky that she isn't destroying legitimate businesses and making false accusations of abuse. Someone who supports a law like that law that just passed doesn't know the difference anyway. It's above their level of competence. That "brick wall" that Kay Simpson has run into is simple reality. No one has resources to waste on things that violate human rights.