Fincher: Beau’s Law is a true underdog story
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“Cave canem.”
The Alabama Legislature passes a whole bunch of bills every year.
But for all the legislation that passes, there will be more bills that fail. Getting a bill all the way through the process from introduction to the governor’s signature is often a tough row to hoe.
It is common for a bill to require multiple attempts over several years to become a law, and, of course, there are plenty of bills that never reach the promised land.
Still, on rare occasions there are bills that buck the trend by emerging suddenly from the haze and gliding through the legislative process right into the Code of Alabama. One such example came this year in the form of Senate Bill 361, also known as Beau’s Law.
Beau’s Law is named after a dog that was recorded struggling to find a dry place to sit while chained in a Birmingham-area yard after last year’s snowstorm. He appeared only to have a flimsy-looking makeshift cardboard shelter available to him.
Beau’s Law creates some minimum standards to which dog owners must adhere when it comes to tethering a dog to a stationery object or confining a dog for long periods of time. Additionally, it sets standards for shelter, food and water that must be available to a tethered or confined dog.
It also provides local governments some authority to appoint animal control or law enforcement officers to investigate alleged violations and creates misdemeanor penalties for dog owners found to be in violation.
Beau’s Law had a lot of factors working against it, the main one being time. It was not introduced in the Senate until March 10, less than a month before the legislative session would adjourn for the year.
Legislators also took a weeklong spring break later in March, perhaps to get started on their base tans for this summer.
Moreover, two of the more powerful lobbying groups in Montgomery – the Alabama Farmers Federation and the Alabama Cattlemen’s Association – were against the bill. That is tough to overcome even for the most well-organized efforts.
Furthermore, as the House of Representatives was debating Beau’s Law on the final day of the session, the bill was hit with a flurry of proposed amendments. Claire Henderson, of Alabama Daily News, counted 11 total amendments offered, six of which were accepted into the final version of the bill.
Bills often tend to lose support when multiple amendments are added late in the legislative process as the original vision for the policy may be corrupted.
And you may be stunned to learn that, on occasion, some ne’er-do-wells will try to add amendments they know will torpedo a bill. Please locate a chair, beloved reader, if the shock from that revelation causes you to become lightheaded.
Yet in this case, not only did the House pass the bill – including the six amendments tacked on during the lengthy debate on the House floor – the Senate accepted all of the House’s changes and passed the bill without negotiation.
1819 News quoted Rep. Jennifer Fidler, R-Silverhill, from an interview on Mobile-area radio program “The Jeff Poor Show” saying, “(O)ne of my colleagues said that he’d been serving in the Legislature for so many years and had not seen eight different amendments on a bill that came to the House floor.”
Yet Beau’s Law did have a couple of major factors going for it. One was it was sponsored by Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, the Senate president pro tem, which is the most powerful position in the Alabama Senate.
The other positive was the Greater Birmingham Humane Society did a bang-up job of organizing and advocating for legislators not to let the bill languish on the House calendar without coming up for a vote.
Animal rights advocates tend to be highly dedicated to their causes and active in pushing for them. Beau’s Law advocates staged a sizable rally in front of the State House and did well getting supporters to contact their legislators.
Overall, the juice was worth the last-minute squeeze. Beau’s Law provides law enforcement with a legal basis to investigate and act upon claims of animal neglect.
The bill’s opposition is not wrong in pointing out many of the law’s requirements are open to broad interpretation as to what constitutes a violation and what does not, which could lead to uneven enforcement.
Hopefully, further refinements can be added should reporting and enforcement difficulties pop up, but setting some general parameters is at least a step in the right direction.
Some legislative sessions end with a whimper. This one ended with an emphatic bark.
Brandon Fincher is an academic journal editor at Auburn University. He lives in Opelika with his wife, daughter and two Labrador retrievers. You can find his writing at brandonfincher.com.
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