As soon as once more, Missouri legislators are demonstrating their odd and disturbing allegiance to pet mills. The state already is infamous nationally as floor zero for this shady trade. Now, in line with the latest development amongst Republicans of refusing to let native governments make their very own choices, pending laws would stop St. Louis and different cities from clamping down on pet shops that allow the trade. This invoice deserves to the relegated to the liner of the cages the place these puppies are stored.
Pet mills — outlined as giant business operations by which canine are bred on the market in overcrowded and infrequently unhealthy situations — have been a Missouri scourge for a few years. The state has topped the Human Society’s record of the “Horrible Hundred” worst pet mills within the U.S. for every of 10 years because the group started placing out the annual report.
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Abuses in that trade had been obvious sufficient that Missouri voters in 2010 handed a poll initiative imposing restrictions and requirements of care. The state Legislature, because it tends to do, promptly reversed the need of the voters on the behest of the dog-breeding trade. Then, in 2014, lawmakers received passage of a constitutional “right-to-farm” modification that was really a thinly disguised shill to pet mills.
Along with denying ladies the proper to organic autonomy and ensuring criminals and the mentally ailing aren’t thwarted from getting their fingers on weapons, Missouri’s ruling Republicans are more than pleased to roll over for the puppy-mill trade.
So it’s that the Home final week permitted a invoice that may stop native municipalities all through Missouri from banning or proscribing pet outlets. There’s no such native statute in St. Louis or wherever else within the state proper now, however blue states like Illinois and liberal communities elsewhere have completed simply that. The Missouri invoice is a preemptive strike, clearly designed to make sure that trade giants like Petland, the Ohio-based pet retailer chain with lobbyists in Jefferson Metropolis, aren’t restricted of their enterprise practices by pesky native elected officers making an attempt to hold out the desires of their native constituents.
Missouri Republicans have an extended historical past of serving the pursuits of pet mills and their adjoining industries. Eviscerating native management over native points is a brand new factor with at the moment’s GOP, not simply right here however across the nation. Like once-vaunted Republican rules of household values, legislation and order and monetary duty, native management nonetheless will get some GOP lip service at times, however it’s clearly not what the social gathering stands for.
The invoice now strikes to the Senate, the place Republican leaders have often proven extra restraint and adherence to their very own rules than do their Home GOP counterparts. This could be an excellent time to show these qualities and bury this cynical invoice good and deep.