Daniel Weintraub: Why the new license law is the tail wagging the cat

Our family cat, Bowl, has already had to endure a life lived under a ridiculous name bestowed on him by a 10-year-old. Now the furry fellow has been hunted down by the city bureaucracy and forced to obtain a license, with the most intimate details of his anatomy and medical history filed away in the municipal record books.

Bowl was our household's first victim of a well-intended but misguided Sacramento law that requires cat owners to register their pets or face increasingly stringent penalties that could, according to one city official, include a lien being placed on their home.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that no human ever "owns" a cat – the relationship usually works the other way around – the Sacramento program is a classic case of penalizing responsible people for the behavior of those whose actions the city would like to change.

My first reaction when I got the cat license notice in the mail from the city was to throw it away. After my wife convinced me that trashing the notice might not be prudent, I had another reaction: "How did they know we had a cat?"

It soon became apparent that the city knew we had a cat because we had taken Bowl to the vet for a lame foot. While he was there, he had a rabies vaccination. And it turns out that the city requires the vet to file a report every time a rabies shot is administered.

I'm still not sure why the city would need that information. But I do know how it is using it: to track down cat owners and begin extracting $10 a year from them for the privilege of living in the company of a feline.

All of this came about because the city puts a lot of cats to death at the municipal animal shelter. Many of them are unwanted kittens born at home or feral cats born and raised in the city wilds.

City leaders, in their wisdom, wanted to fight this problem by encouraging cat owners to spay or neuter their animals, reducing unwanted pregnancies and unwanted felines.

So a year ago, they adopted a requirement that every cat owner pay $10 a year for a license. The license for an unaltered cat costs $75. This would be, the city figured, an incentive for people to fix their cats.

But at least two problems occur to me.

First, if the goal is to get people to fix their cats, why should those who have done so have to pay anything to the city? The license, if one is needed, could be free for those who have done what the city desires – like a "fix-it" ticket, literally – while those who have not altered their cats would pay a fee.

Which brings us to the second problem. Something tells me that people who leave their cats unaltered and then let them roam free are not necessarily the types who are going to care about a city license.

Donna Wicky, administrative officer for the animal control department, told me that so far, about 2,300 people have licensed their cats. Only 15 of them paid the higher fee for unaltered pets. It is possible that many of the others were prompted to fix their cats by the high price of the license. But I doubt it. And so far, there has been no reduction in the number of cats euthanized by the city.

Wicky says national formulas suggest that we Sacramentans have about 100,000 cats living among us. So the city has a long way to go to get them all licensed. But those little postcards in the mail should help.

My wife persuaded me to pay up after reading that failing to do so would result in escalating late fees. The extra penalty was $10 after a month, $20 after 60 days and then $100. Wicky told me that residents who still refuse to pay could be ticketed and fined $300.

And what if you ignore the citation? "We will send them to a collection agency after that," she said. The agency, she said, would be empowered to place a lien on a person's home or have the money deducted from an income tax refund.

Wicky agreed with me that the cat owners in whom her department is most interested are the least likely to comply. How does the city intend to reach them? By following up on complaints about strays. Animal control officers will respond, follow the pets home and check to see if they are licensed, Wicky said. She conceded that this tactic would work better with dogs than with cats, who can be a little wily at times.

"It will be much more difficult to identify the owner of a cat or to get compliance," she said.

Exactly. I predict that most of the people who do comply will be those whose cats – like Bowl – are altered, vaccinated and home at night.

The feral cat problem will remain. But a lot of money will have changed hands in the meantime.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Daniel Weintraub, (916) 321-1914. Readers can see his California Insider political blog at CapitolAlert.com