Lake Cities Information Group

First we want you to know, that the local animal control officer Ken Lowrie has been extremely nice and helpful, and our opinions do not reflect at all on the persons who uphold our laws, but are directed at changing the law.

Due to a incident with a neighbor, we had to review some of the local regulations that the town of Hickory Creek has concerning animals.  Some of the regulations appear to be outdated, vague, or to be poorly written.  We will try and see how we can approach the town on getting this updated.

Here is the text directly from the regulations.

Sec. 2.01.003     Nuisances

(a)     The keeping of any animal which, by frequent or long-continued barking, crying or noise, shall disturb any person of ordinary sensibilities in the vicinity shall be considered a nuisance.

After doing a bit of research we did find some interesting excerpts from Homeowner’s Rights and it looks like the “ordinary sensibilities” is basically left up to the judge to determine. Just what we want to do, spend money to determine if our neighbor has “ordinary sensibilities”.

Now it seems to me, that this could be written to be a bit more concise, to both protect the pet owner, and complainant.  For instance, why leave it to only one person to complain, quite a number of cities require that two complaints be filed by different households. This reduces the possibility of using this law as a form of legal harassment.  Others require noise to be over a certain decibel limit. To me, it appears that the laws are written to be vague making the courts, or other officials make the determination, but maybe I am being a bit facetious here.

Well enough with that one, while this was brought up, lets go over another that this action brought up.

Hickory Creek requires that you register your pets (dogs and cats) yearly (though there is no fee). The ordinance also specifies that you must have rabies shots yearly. Never mind that most rabies shots (other than the initial shots) are good for three years. Or that studies have shown that in reality their good for over 5 years. So lets review the law, and see what we can recommend.

First the ordinance:

Sec. 2.01.001     Definitions

Currently vaccinated. Vaccinated and satisfying the following criteria:

(1)     The animal must have been at least three months of age at the time of vaccination.

(2)     At least 30 days have elapsed since the initial vaccination.

(3)     Not more than 12 months have elapsed since the most recent vaccination.

Now, I don’t know about you, but all my animals have the three year vaccinations. These cost the same as the one year, which are only done on the first vaccination. While we can not tell when a peculiar ordinance has been written, we feel it is outdated.

Laws where possible, should be written to stay current with changing technology. We do not believe that any of the council members or our mayor is a veterinarian, so where do they get the information to create such ordinances that effect all of us?  Most likely from other cities. But doing just a bit of research myself, we found what would be superior, and is updated yearly, from The American Veterinary Medical Association called  “Model Rabies Control Ordinance“.  After reading the preceding link,  you will see that it will change only one section of our local ordinance, and reflect current and future definitions of what “Currently vaccinated” means, as specified in the “compendium of animal rabies control document“  as written by the Center for Disease Control, they know a thing or two about rabies.

Abiding by the letter of the local ordinance, this will cost me a total of 90 dollars additional over a three year period for my three pets, doesn’t sound like much, unless we ask you to pay it.  It also has been shown that over medication of rabies shots causes all kinds of problems in animals, if you don’t believe it do a bit or research on the web. It would also reduce the cost for the cities to issue tags that are valid for the duration of the rabies tag.

So now that we have gone over this, we get to do the fun part. We will document here on the site, our experience with trying to update a local ordinance. Hopefully this is more fun than having all your teeth pulled at once.

Here is the site where Hickory Creek keeps their online code of ordinances.