(ANIMAL NEWS) GOP Rep. Steve King made a shocking statement at a town hall meeting last week where he announced that dog fighting should be legal. He defended his absurd statement by saying that since human fighting is legal, not letting dogs fight would be prioritizing animals over humans. King is also the creator of an amendment that targets animal protection and environmental laws. Read on to learn what the Humane Society has to say on the issue. — Global Animal
Wayne Pacelle, A Humane Nation
U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, gives very literal meaning to the term “backward thinking.” In a telephone town hall last night, Rep. King defended his campaign to block pending federal legislation to crack down on dogfighting. Specifically, the legislation he tried to defeat makes it a crime for an adult to attend or to bring a child to a staged fight between animals.
He said there’s something wrong with passing legislation to keep children away from animal fights when “it’s not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting.” He added, “there’s something wrong with the priorities of people that [sic] think like that. There’s something wrong with Wayne Pacelle and the Humane Society of the United States’ way of thinking like that.”
That’s not the only measure that Rep. King has taken an extreme position on. He says he’s for states’ rights, but he is the author of an amendment, adopted during the recent House Agriculture Committee consideration of the farm bill, that seeks to nullify a raft of statewide laws―his target being laws to protect animals, either duly approved by state lawmakers or directly by voters, and also perhaps nullifying laws on environmental protection, worker rights, food safety, and other issues. Message to Mr. King: States’ rights doesn’t mean protecting the states’ rights to pass only those laws you agree with. It means adhering to a broader constitutional principle of sovereignty for the states.
Rep. King wants to be sure that there are no federal or state standards governing the treatment of laying hens. He opposes the federal hen bill backed by the egg industry and animal protection groups. King wants to make sure that if a farmer crams a laying hen into a 48-inch space, and it happens to be legal in Iowa, other states must accept eggs from that type of unethical farmer. I am no constitutional scholar, but I am pretty sure there is nothing about federally compelled commerce in the 10th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution.
Dogfighting, extreme confinement of laying hens, and an attack on states’ rights. What a guy.
More Wayne Pacelle: http://hsus.typepad.com/wayne/2012/07/rep-king-animal-fighting.html?
Mr. King is correct on his thoughts on dig fighting why would the amercian people take the fact that if a human fights lets praise that but if a dog fights lets put the owner in jail so dogs are more important then humans make sense of that
What a government?????