Received this morning:
“I cant believe my 10 yr old grand daughter got a $153 ticket yd for walking her dog, great way to find out state has a law requires a person to be 18 to walk a dog without adult supervision.”
Received this morning:
“I cant believe my 10 yr old grand daughter got a $153 ticket yd for walking her dog, great way to find out state has a law requires a person to be 18 to walk a dog without adult supervision.”
For the record, she had a leash (i checked with him on this).
Didn’t the officer involved have discretion to issue a warning in the first instance?
Does anyone wonder why Boeing offices left Washington? It seems this kind of thing is the norm for Washington.
Don
Here in Oklahoma, more citations for unregistered pets are being issued when police are investigating other matters. It’s an alternative revenue source.
Hard to know the logic behind having to an adult to walk a dog.
Yeah, a pretty ludicrous law to be sure, and apparently a STATE law, not just a local ordinance, which makes it even more puzzling.
But the kicker for me, the icing on the cake, was the steep cost of the fine. $153??
Hmmm. How many weeks of allowance is that for most 10 year olds?
David Handy+
A better law to enforce would be the requirement that people keep dogs on leads when walking them in public spaces.
The real problem occurs when, for example, a pit bull (off lead) goes tearing across a park after a little beagle–and where the former is bent on rampage and not on innocent play. I’ve known it to happen.
(And pit bull owners can save their comments–or send them in; I don’t care. I just don’t like even the looks of those things.)
My point is that it’s very rare for police to have the time or to take the trouble to deal with dogs at all. To fine a 10-year-old safely walking a dog is not a good idea. In fact, what is a good idea is a 10-year-old safely walking her dog.
The nanny state run amok.
Pure “nanny state.”
The elite dictatorship of the proletariat knows ‘what’s best’ for the proletariat.
And yet, the 10 year old is NOT permitted to walk the dog, they can probably get free condoms from the school’s nurse. Priorities, folks.
Yes, St. Jimbob, you’re right. My son (now 14) has been walking our dog ever since we got him (when my son was 11). It never even occurred to me to check to see whether this was “permissible” by the state or not. Ridiculous – and a little frightening as well.
I, too, think this is insane (no wonder we have a “tea party movement”) – I’d like to follow up with what David Handy writes – this has to be a local ordinance – I can’t see the folks in eastern Washington allowing this to stand.
I suppose that’s what happens as other sources of revenue decline.
John,
You’re stating that as a fact not as a good thing, aren’t you?
I would have thought that both from a conservative and a progressive perspective, it’s wrong to employ public order instruments as revenue sources precisely because it diverts the focus away from public order in general to certain types of public order in particular.
The officer should have issued a warning first.
The law may go to far.
But I would offer that the law could make sense in certain circumstances. I for one would not begrudge Washington lawmakers from not wanting a 10 year old to be walking a pit bull unsupervised. Mind you full grown adults are often not strong enough to restrain a doberman or a rottweiler, but a child could certainly have trouble with this. Now if it’s a dachshund or a toy poodle, fine. I guess it could come down to your philosophy of government; whether parents should be responsible for such decisions or whether the state has any role. That is certainly a legitimate discussion. But I can imagine circumstances (say, a well publicized case where a large dog got out of a child’s hands and mauled or killed another child) that could have prompted the folks in Olympia to make such a law.
I find it ironic that folks would complain about a “nanny state” when we are talking about children, who occasionally do need a nanny.
Okay, I got myself in trouble with that last remark. Parents should always have the foremost authority over their children. It is not necessarily the government’s job to look over a parent’s shoulder to be a nanny, but I would say there are times (most obviously in child abuse cases) where the government does have a legitimate interest. And in the case of dog walking, there could be a concern over torts incurred by a violent animal. I’m still not sure I like the law, and I certainly don’t like the heavy-handed way it was applied in this case, but I can see what could be some of the reasoning involved.
I clicked on the comments hoping to find this was a joke. Unbelievable. If the owner of a huge or dangerous dog allows someone who can’t control it to walk the dog, leash or no, the owner is responsible for damages. A blanket law saying under-16s can’t walk the family dog is entirely ridiculous.
Most times, it seems to me the dog is walking the person.
So…someone could be a legal driver of an automobile at 16 but not competent to walk a dog on a leash? As many anti-government, free spirits as I know that live in Washington State, I have trouble believing this is a state law.
I knew before I even looked at the comments how this one out-of-context anecdote would be received into the T19 narrative.
Whatever. I’d still rather live here than any other state in the U.S.
If only she had been an illegal walking the dog across our national border she might have had a chance as our government seems to find it just abhorrent to apply law to such circumstances. Weird means of revenue collection. but in this austere fiscal environment government does what it must to keep the ravenously hungry bureaucracy fed.
This psychadelic farce we are living since 1/20/2009 reminds me of the movie ‘Popeye’ that starred Robin Williams. The movie has a weird tax collector character who keeps showing up to collect the most ridiculous taxes imposed on the most unimaginable things. We are about to see this particular loony farce replayed in 3-D and Wide-Screen Technicolor six months from now on 1/1/2011 when the evil Bush (may he be roundly condemned and spat upon by one and all!!!) tax cuts expire. Coupled with the recently ‘deemed passed’ FY 2011 budget (which has no line items – just a huge $1.2 Trillion pile of our money to be extorted from us for Obama to sprinkle about pretty much as he ‘deems’ appropriate) gifted to us by our beneficent Congress, the 2011 tax increases will just water your eyes when they land on you.
Elections do, indeed, have consequences. Enjoy.
Ross, I’m sure Washington is a wonderful state. But, narrative or no narrative, is this actually the law in Washington, and is it not ridiculous? Is it actually enforced only if the dog gets out of control, and that’s the “context” you refer to?
Most states have a few ridiculous statutes on the books, and often publicity causes legislators to repair the law.
Searching the Washington State website shows no evidence of any such regulation or law.
I couldn’t find it in the RCW either, although admittedly I didn’t spend a huge amount of time looking. I suspect it of being a local ordinance, if anything, but since the story doesn’t say where in Washington it took place there’s no way to know. Katherine — what would be part of the “context” that’s missing here.
The rest of the missing context would be that we don’t know the circumstances under which the officer wrote the ticket, and — since the grandmother who communicated with Kendall wasn’t there — neither does she, except by report. Maybe the girl was sedately walking the dog and the officer ticketed her for no reason except that he was having a bad day. Maybe she was failing to control the dog and the officer ticketed her because of that. Maybe the officer started to give her a warning and she backtalked him. Maybe the officer happens to be a petty dictator who delights in enforcing trivial rules. We don’t know any of that. All we know is the bare fact, presented without context; and the majority here immediately leaps to “Nanny state! Condoms! Bad Obama!”
Ross, a quick internet search of a couple of “bad law” sites does not bring up a Washington state U-18 dog-walking law. Perhaps it’s a local ordinance. (There were a couple of amusing Washington bad laws. All states have ’em.)
I agree with you that the “bad Obama” #21 is over the top. We don’t know where this law is in force, the context, or who passed it.
#25, over the top?
Wait until the 1/1/2011 tax load lands on you and then revisit your judgment. I’ll be delighted to be wrong on this one. But I confidently fear I am right.
Dilbertnomore, I suspect we often agree about politics, but what did your post have to do with dog-walking in Washington?
#14: Precisely. It is un-Christian and immoral to use fines as a surreptitious way of raising revenues. The point of fines is to discourage certain behavior.
[i] Please do not go off topic with references to the current administration. [/i]
-Elf Lady
29: Talk about “nanny state.”
#27, the connection is obvious. Ridiculous fines (federal, state or local) imposed during periods of fiscal stress felt by the bureaucratic class are the result in highly creative revenue generation measures which do everything possible to disguise the solid fact that ALL taxes (or fines, if you like) are paid by the individual citizen. On 1/1/2011 we will come under the most massive tax attack in the history of our nation using every subterfuge imaginable to extract every cent possible from every individual citizen will be just a larger extension of this silly attempt to pick our pockets via a put up dog walking charge. The only aspects of revenue generation that will most certainly be off the table will be pork for the home district/state and budget reductions. As I’ve noted before, elections do, indeed, have consequences.
#31, the connection is not obvious at all. Your analysis assumes that this is a revenue-generating fine imposed by the bureaucratic class. We don’t know specifically where this ordinance is in effect, who passed it, or the circumstances under which it was applied to Dr. Harmon’s friend’s granddaughter.
If T19 has a post up on the upcoming expiration of the tax cuts and how much more everybody is going to pay, I’ll be happy to join you in the gloom.
Obvious to me. Sorry not so to others.
The problem is that not every problem is associated with what one believes to be THE BIG PROBLEM. Sometimes dumb local laws are just dumb local laws.
RE: “I suppose that’s what happens as other sources of revenue decline.”
Yeh, when the people in charge of the government are collectivist fascists.
RE: “I knew before I even looked at the comments . . . ”
Wow, who could have predicted that a bunch of people who are conservative politically and like individual liberty might post comments about such a vignette! What a shocker. So much so that a non political-conservative had to trail over and comment on it.
Now now, Sarah, don’t go tarring us all with the same political brush. Dan Crawford would be most upset, to name but one. 🙂
heaven forbid we teach our kids any responsibility by having them walk the dog, the state apparently will be teaching them (hah!)….
Dan Crawford upset? Say it ain’t so! Just because he regards politicians as functional sociopaths and politics of any stripe as an innately corrupt enterprise? C’mon. Jeremy.
Hmm, our ten year old granddaughter walks her tiny chihuahua on a leash, yet neither the City of Los Banos nor the state of California requires that she must be 18 or older in order to do it. Washington is indeed a little ‘odd,’ as my family and I discovered when we were stationed on the Makah Reservation in the mid ’70s with the Air Force.