Editorial: Don’t bark at higher fees from state Bureau of Dog Law
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Man’s best friend can be priceless — but isn’t always cheap.
Dog food costs more than one might expect. So do rawhide bones and rabies shots, toys and treats. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the way all those chewed-on shoes add up.
But the cost of a Pennsylvania pooch just might go up a little more. Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding, two state legislators and Gisele Fetterman, wife of Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, are pushing to increase the cost of registering a dog.
Increasing fees is often unpopular, but in this case, it could be a way to save taxpayers money.
“For the first time since the state dog law was enacted in 1893, the department in 2020 had to use taxpayer funds to enforce the state’s dog laws,” Redding said.
That hardly seems fair when part of the problem was all too predictable. It’s that everything gets more expensive.
An annual dog license has been $6.50 for 25 years. Let’s think about other prices from 1996. Gasoline, for example, was averaging $1.29 a gallon. Milk was about the same. A Big Mac was about $2.50. All of those have gone up — a lot.
So has the cost of labor to run things such as the Bureau of Dog Law Enforcement, which has 57 employees. That’s 23% less than it had in 1996.
But the bureau doesn’t just supervise licensed dogs. It monitors dangerous dogs that could attack someone. It works to prevent unsafe and unscrupulous breeding operations and puppy mills. It keeps track of kennels and facilities that take care of dogs. Overall, the job is to make sure that both people and dogs are kept safe.
And the bureau does it with fewer people than there are counties in the state. That isn’t fair to the dog owners, the other taxpayers or the dogs.
Which is why Redding and the others want to raise the cost of an annual license to $10 a year. A lifetime fee would jump from $31.50 to $49.
Yes, it’s an increase. No one likes to pay more for something than they already are. But it’s a move that should have been made years ago, maybe in smaller steps that would have added up to more over time. If it had, the taxpayers wouldn’t have been hit with a $1.4 million shortfall to cover.
The hike also is not that much. It’s the price of a chew toy a year. It’s the cost of a 50-pound bag of dog food over a lifetime.