As I’m sure many of you have gathered, I am an animal lover. I don’t eat them, I own a pile of them, and I like most of them better than people. Except centipedes. Those need to stay the hell away from me (and even then, when I come across one of them in the house, I put a cup on it, and then get my partner to take them outside. I figure it’s not fair to kill something just because it’s horrifying ugly. Unless it tries to get in my mouth. Then it’s game on).
I have 3 animals licensed with the City of Toronto- a process which required me to send in a whopping $55 (that’s sarcasm- $55 is less than it costs me to register my car with the City for a year). For licensing my pets, I get a metal tag displaying a registration number and the phone number of Toronto’s Animal Services department, so should one of my animals go missing they can be returned to me. The fee goes directly towards the cost of running Toronto’s public animal shelters.
Now, like most government instituted fees, the licensing fee is not optional. Pet owners caught without a licensed pet can be given a $240 ticket, and can be fined up to $5,000 in court (although I have never spoken to anyone who has been given a ticket for having an unlicensed pet, and I come across a fair amount of dog owners in out local dog park who have dogs that aren’t wearing their licensing tag). When this required licensing fee was introduced, the City hired a bunch of high school kids and sent them around knocking on doors and looking in windows for signs of pets, asking residents to get their pets licensed. Of course people were none …
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