California could give dogs and cats a bill of rights. They may be better off with a treat

A California legislator recently introduced a “Dog and Cat Bill of Rights,” which could be taken to mean the state has solved all its human problems. Or perhaps we’re just realizing that other mammals deserve a crack at running the place better.

Indeed, if Los Angeles dog owner and Assemblyman Miguel Santiago’s bill had any means of enforcement, it would grant dogs and cats more — and arguably more useful — rights than their human companions, including “the right to a life of comfort free ... of anxiety” and “the right to preventive and therapeutic health care.” On the other hand, some of the proffered canine and feline prerogatives might strike some human Californians as unwanted burdens, including the right to “daily mental stimulation,” the right to “appropriate exercise” and, perhaps most foreboding, the “right” to be spayed or neutered.

For all its laudable intentions, the Dog and Cat Bill of Rights turns out not to be a bill of rights at all. Santiago and the bill’s sponsor, the animal rights group Social Compassion in Legislation, propose it only as a list of aspirational principles to be displayed in the state’s animal shelters.

A bill of rights isn’t the most suitable framework for such a measure, but that hasn’t stopped a host of California legislators from proposing their own versions of the Constitution’s most hallowed afterthought. Such is the draw of the phrase denoting the first 10 amendments that the state has already codified, among others, a Youth Bill of Rights, a Parents’ Bill of Rights, a Census Bill of Rights, a Property Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, a Student Athlete Bill of Rights, a Firefighters’ Procedural Bill of Rights and a Residential Property Insurance Bill of Rights. It’s almost enough rights to make a wrong.

Human rights are typically said to spring from the divine, the inherent, the self-evident, but the crush of lesser rights at hand owes more to a perpetual quest for gravitas by association. Even the most mediocre bit of legislative busywork seems a little more serious with a title like “bill of rights.”

Never mind that much of the original American document was hastily cribbed from the English and stated sloppily enough to construe a God-given entitlement to bear semiautomatic rifles. Even the rightly revered rights enshrined in the First Amendment (though it was originally proposed as the third) have been pressed into such unforeseen and unintended purposes as protecting unlimited political contributions and prohibiting public health precautions.

Sure, humans could do the other animals the favor of enumerating their rights. But haven’t they suffered enough?