Story Archive

When I spotted this story, I thought it was a "dumb law" story. But once I started writing, I realized that Rehr had behaved like a complete obliviot. Seriously, she got an in-person warning that if she didn't renew her dog license she'd be arrested. The law, on the other hand, turned out to be a lot more defensible: The dog-licensing scheme is used to protect the public against rabies (that is, against a health threat that does not depend on further voluntary action by the dog owner besides keeping an unvaccinated dog in an inhabited area), and Rehr's case got a lot of people to renew their dog licenses, which a mere civil fine would not have done. Notably, unlike the typical case of overcriminalization, violators here get plenty of notice: the scheme is designed to be effective at getting people to keep their dogs licensed, not to catch people unawares and throw them in prison for years. There is, however, a question about how valuable rabies vaccines are in a country where human deaths of rabies are down to two or three per year -- in part because of those very vaccines.