Governor Schwarzenegger (after five years, it still gives me the jibblies to write that) has proposed a 9% tax on veterinary services. Here’s some info from the fact sheet I received when we took Petey in for an eye infection:
In this weak economy, animal owners are already making tough choices. Adding sales tax to veterinary services will force owners to make difficult choices about the health and welfare of their pets.
• Pets are members of the family and an important source of companionship. This proposed tax could add approximately 9% to the cost of veterinary care. The result will be that many animals won’t get the medical care they need and they will be abandoned or euthanized.
• Shelter populations are increasing beyond capacity as many Californians lose their homes to foreclosure. If people can’t afford to take care of their pets, they may be forced to abandon them to shelters, adding to the overcrowding and financial strain.
• More than 800,000 cats and dogs enter California shelters every year at a cost to taxpayers of $275 million. As shelters become filled beyond capacity, more healthy animals will be euthanized adding to the emotional strain of shelter workers.
There’s more on the sheet, including information about food production animals.
I know there are more pressing issues out there right now, and I’ll admit that I feel a little guilty posting an action alert about the well-being of pets when the well-being of other animals (and, you know, humans) is under more severe attack. And a 9% tax, although high, isn’t the end of the world (says the middle-classer with a single, healthy cat).
But a tax like this says a lot about how people view both health care and animal welfare. We still seem to insist that a trip to the hospital is a product, akin to a new purse or car or TV, and a patient is a customer who can simply choose to forgo care if they don’t have the money. Animals are considered luxuries; if you want a pet, go for it, but it really should be a low priority. Even if everyone grants that animals like seeing eye dogs are necessary, it’s actually pretty revolutionary to think of animal companionship as a right instead of a privilege. What if you need a companion animal for your emotional health? What if you view animals as friends and family members with unique personalities? (Filthy hippie! Go back to Berkeley!) Is that dog still a frivolous luxury? Should that bird’s well-being be contingent on paying a tax? If humans shouldn’t be taxed on vital medical care, why should animals? Because humans are just better? Because humans can speak out against it?
So while this tax is a relatively small injustice, it has much broader implications for how we view the health of our animals.
Also, while these two situations are in no way on the same level, I think that if you take this mentality to its logical extreme, you end up in the camp that claims that basic rights like having children should be reserved for the middle class and up. If your job doesn’t pay you enough to take care of your dependent, then the problem doesn’t lie with your job – it lies with your stupid, selfish decision to care for a dependent. And there seems to be an arbitrary and invisible income line below which people simply lose the right to have families (whatever those families might consist of).
The official action alert is here.
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Also, a mural on the face of the former Valley Cities JCC building is facing sandblasting. Here’s a photo from the Jewish Journal:
Image description: a building with a lively and detailed mural depicting children dancing, reproductions of old photographs, and human hands touching. The words “VALLEY CITIES JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER” are written across the top.
My grandmother died two years ago, and we held her memorial in this building. Sherman Oaks isn’t exactly the most happening city on earth, and when I approached the building on the day of the memorial, I was struck by the little oasis of art on a street that housed mainly strip malls and unadorned housing.
Again, it’s not the end of the world if this mural is destroyed. And the new owners of the building are certainly within their rights to change its appearance. Except, wait – don’t they have a responsibility to the larger community? If the residents of Sherman Oaks value the mural, if they derive pleasure from viewing it, if it’s a historical artifact (Yiddishkayt points out that it contains one of the view remaining public displays of written Yiddish in L.A.), then shouldn’t they have a say in whether it stays or goes? If residents of, say, gated communities have to comply with their neighbors’ aesthetic preferences by keeping their houses uniform, why doesn’t that logic apply here? Why are “tidy” adornments like lawns more desirable than “messy” adornments like art? Does it really all boil down to money and power, or are there deeper cultural forces at work here?
This is kind of a tangent, but this situation makes me think of public space. Who does public space (parks, medians, sidewalks, etc) belong to? The easy answer is a city – but who does a city belong to, if not its citizens? How many of you view public space as forbidden areas – places that you can look at and sometimes walk on, but aren’t allowed to alter? I’ve been reading up on the guerrilla gardening movement, which targets public space and uses it to grow food and other beneficial plants. Who gets to choose what grows on public land? Why do we feel like we have no right to the space in our own communities? Why does planting food alongside a sidewalk feel so subversive that guerrilla gardeners regularly do it in the middle of the night? (Interesting note: many gardeners report that city officials visit the sites – not to arrest them, but to thank them for their work.)
One possible argument is that, if everyone felt we had the right to use and alter public space, there’d be anarchy – people pulling up each other’s crops all over the place. And I’m sure some theft and vandalism would happen, but why is the fear of chaos so overwhelming that we don’t want to risk it? Why not tackle the underlying causes of crime instead of living in fear of it? And why tax my kitten for the misfortune of having a clogged tear duct?
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Guerrilla gardening works because pretty much everyone agrees that they are improving the space. You would see the same lack of objection to guerrilla litter removers, for example.
If the gardeners took actions that were detrimental in some people’s eyes (like, for example, cutting down trees in order to plant flowers) then you would see much more of an uproar. My reluctance to alter shared space to my liking isn’t because I feel excluded from it; rather it’s because I recognize that it belongs to the community of which I am a part, and I respect others’ right to have a say in how it’s used as well as my own.
One reason guerrilla gardeners work in the middle of the night is because the agreement that they are improving the space is not entirely universal: there’s always a crank in every crowd. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is because doing it in the middle of the night feels naughty, and being naughty is fun.
The sales tax on veterinary care will weigh most heavily on people facing high vet bills which, due to the nature of illness, often cannot be budgeted for. It’s kicking people when they’re down. Just raise the freaking income tax rate already; I don’t like income tax either, but at least it’s fairly distributed.
I think they should keep the mural for its historical value and happy colors.
I once worked in a place that made valves. It had previously been occupied by a maker of wheelchair lifts for buses. In one of the upstairs offices, now used for storage, there was a great big blueprint on the wall for the lifts. My bosses didn’t take that down, because they were lazy, but I always thought it was neat to have it still there over the shelves. What I liked even better was a poster showing the lift in use and the caption “What I can do is a million times more important than what I can’t.” Anyway, I didn’t feel that my identity was threatened by the presence of signs of a previous tenant.
Pets…Ouch. This last year, for the first time in my life, I have thought I might want to get a cat, but the economy intervened. It’s bad enough to remember that there are so many kitties being put to death because people don’t bother to neuter both parents or really learn how to care for cats. It’s worse to realize that somewhere there is a beautiful marbled kitty facing the same fate because he or she can’t come home with ME, and fit nicely in my arms and lift the winter out of my heart.
And how guilty should one feel if one can only spend 1 grand or less, instead of 10 grand, to keep said cat well? If the choice is between having it put down or being homeless, well…I couldn’t survive out there, there’s too many homeless already and the cat would not be safe, and the shelter would be full.
Yes, I have considered volunteering at a no-kill shelter, but have other things to get out of the way first.
What if you view animals as friends and family members with unique personalities? (Filthy hippie! Go back to Berkeley!)
If you view animals in a different way than the laws of your state do, you are welcome to your view but it doesn’t mean that the state is committing an injustice by taxing animals’ health care. Animals uniformly do not have a status in the law anywhere close to that of humans. I can wash a bug down the drain with absolute legal impunity and very little moral condemnation.
Is that dog still a frivolous luxury?
In your eyes, no; in the eyes of others, possibly. My viewing a BMW as a family member doesn’t mean you won’t view it as a frivolous luxury.
Should that bird’s well-being be contingent on paying a tax? If humans shouldn’t be taxed on vital medical care, why should animals? Because humans are just better? Because humans can speak out against it?
Under the law, yes, human are “better” than animals, at least in the sense that they have capacities that other animals do not and therefore we humans treat one another differently than we do the other animals. I fully expect that cats treat one another differently than they do humans.
Humans have an obligation, because of their capacity to think in moral terms, to treat animals decently, e.g. by not causing them pain gratuitously. Because I am human, I have an obligation to oppose hunting wolves in a way that might cause them to be wounded rather than immediately killed, and thus the hunting causes pain gratuitously when there are other methods of reducing the wolf population that avoid that outcome. Wolves have no obligation to me whatsoever.
How far are you going to take the “I need ___ for my mental health” argument? As PG noted, what if I view some very expensive thing in this way? What if I have a phobia of crowds – should I be provided acres of land to live on (and not to pay property taxes on that land), safely kept away from the throngs?
What if it is my view that my mental health depends on burning styrofoam, or some other activity that contributes negatively to the public good?
What if my companion animal, who I love and view as a family member, is nonetheless a danger to my neighbors – or more likely, to my neighbors’ pets or property? Should my supposed “right” to companionship bar the removal of a beloved but problematic pet?
What if my companion animal is just really expensive to own, apart from vet bills? A pet tiger is gonna eat a LOT of food, and meat too, which costs more than grain or dry dog food – should I get a tax rebate on bulk meat?
What if my companion animal of choice is an endangered species?
So, uh, yeah. I would say that for the vast majority of people, animals ARE a luxury and it’s not wrong to tax them as such. Exceptions (and exemptions) can be made for helper animals like seeing-eye dogs or trained monkeys et cetera, and possibly for farmers/ranchers/beekeepers who own animals as part of their business.
Not every good thing in life is a “right, not a privilege.”
And I haven’t even touched on the implications of the fact that most pets exist because some human decided they should exist. People breed dogs and cats, and also spay and neuter them. You ask, “Should that bird’s well-being be contingent on paying a tax?” That bird’s existence was contingent on some human(s) granting mating privileges to its parents.
I’m not allowed to alter it because I didn’t get permission from the owners. “Public space” doesn’t mean I own the space; it means I own a share of the space, and need to confer with the other shareholders before taking action.
You sound a little fuzzy on the concept of ‘public space’, here. If you plant crops in a public space, I think you implicitly give up the right to call them “your” crops. There is no such thing as “each others ‘ crops” in a public space. If you wanted those crops protected as your property, you should either grow them on private land, or contract with the city whereby you have exclusive claim to the crops you grow on leased public land.