Legislature should get to work on law to rein in wild animals

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources issued a release Oct. 21 on its convening of a Dangerous Wild Animals Work Group. The ODNR website said that Gov. John R. Kasich supported the regulation of dangerous wild animals to ensure the public’s safety and animals’ humane treatment. Further, he believed “any new regulations should be developed in a transparent way with input from the public and those who have interests at stake.”

Then the group got to work — behind closed doors, maintaining that it was not subject to the state’s open meetings law because, as a spokesman said, “the group was not created by law, isn’t required to meet or take any action, and has no official power or policy-making authority.”

Well, the board has now delivered its proposals, and, given that the group got its impetus from a wildlife debacle in Muskingum County that made national and international headlines Oct. 18, it’s difficult to see why the group felt compelled to work in secret.

It is going to fall to the General Assembly to sort out the logic behind some of the board’s recommendations. The group’s recommendations can’t simply be adopted by the Legislature, because if the group had standing of that level, its meeting should have obviously been open to the public.

Few could argue with the core of the group’s recommendations, that casual ownership of dangerous wild animals should be banned. The group recommends the effective date of the ban as Jan. 1, 2014, which provides time to allow people who currently own wild animals and are ill-equipped to control them to find qualified new owners inside or outside of Ohio.

Weak for too long

It is something of a scandal that Ohio has not historically had such a ban on ownership. Just in this area, over the years, there have been sporadic controversies over private ownership of lions in Warren and Howland, a bear in Vienna Township and a big cat at the former home of an physician on Youngstown’s South Side. These are just a few of the incidents that stretch over decades. Across the state, hundreds of neighbors have had reason to question why there was a lion or tiger or bear living near them, kept by private unlicensed owners.

Legislation addressing the danger died in the 127th General Assembly in 2007. And the ODNR had been working on proposals to regulate the ownership of wild animals in the state for a couple of years. Late in his administration, former Gov. Ted Strickland issued an executive order requiring the registration of exotic animals with the state by May 1, 2011, and prohibiting anyone convicted of an offense involving the abuse or neglect of any animal from owning exotic animals. Kasich allowed that order to expire.

And then came the massacre in Muskingum, where police were forced to kill 48 wild animals after farm owner Terry Thompson opened his cages, leaving the animals to roam the countryside near Zanesville, and then killed himself. Thompson’s criminal record would not have allowed him to pass the background check if Strickland’s order had been enforced rather than allowed to expire.

Kasich has made it clear that he now believes that no one should own animals such as bears or primates, and has called for a ban on auctions where exotic wild animals are sold.

The General Assembly should move swiftly on legislation, now that the working group has issued its recommendations.

But it must also weigh some of those recommendations, such as the suggestion that the Agriculture Department, not ODNR, be the primary enforcer of a ban on ownership and he sale of dangerous and exotic animals. That may be a logical shift of responsibility, and one that might be easily understood if the group had done its work in the sunshine. Unfortunately the Legislature and the public is now put in a position of having to catch up.