Free and easy

It has been debated regularly in the last several General Assembly sessions, but efforts to reinstitute the program allowing for new humane investigators in Virginia to be found, trained, and put in the field haven’t gotten anywhere.

Humane investigators donate their efforts on a voluntary basis. Mainly, Don Marro says, potential legislation hasn’t gotten anywhere because of “misleading and self-serving agribusiness opposition” — meaning Virginia Farm Bureau and Virginia Agri-Business Council opposition.

Heaven forbid we should ever have humane investigators nosing around the farm. Marro’s interest is more closely focused on companion animals, and the resident of The Plains and recent candidate for the Virginia Senate has written leaders of both parties in Richmond about the HI program.

He appeals to Republicans with the fiscal benefits of having trained, but free investigators on the ground.

Virginians spend $300 million a year in capital costs and $80 million in operating costs for animal control, he says, taxpayer money that is “wasted on abusive behaviors toward pets” but required because we are acting as “custodian and killer of last resort.”

He appeals to Democrats to resusitate the program which they can then tout as a “new idea” -– a commodity with which, he points out, the party is in short supply.

Times-Democrat readers are well acquainted with Humane Investigator Hilleary Bogley, who has been responsible for rescuing countless animals from abuse.

More to Marro’s point, she has helped educate owners before their “random acts of indifference” turn into abuse. She is in our community to educate and persuade as much as she is there to investigate and prosecute.

Marro has had success in Richmond before, notably in raising issues about the use of gas chambers in animal euthansia.

We wish him luck in this endeavor. Contact Sen. Jill Vogel or Sen. Richard Stuart, or one of our multitude of delegates -– Mark Cole, Scott Lingamfelter and Michael Webert -– if you would like to have a say about moving this forward.

And why would you not? “...any opposition is foundationally destructive,” Marro wrote in his letter to Republicans, “since indifference to animal abuse and population control is an out-of-date attitude for this, or any, of the last remaining social ills,” even if -– and Marro can’t help but get in the dig -– “it is consistent with Virginia’s foot-dragging on social reforms.”