BOSTON — With the end of session closing in, advocates at the State House lobby day — held by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Humane Society, the Animal Rescue League of Boston, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund — stressed the need to focus on a few priorities out of the many pending animal-related bills.
Some of those priorities are recently on the move, like “Ollie’s Law,” which would create a committee to develop care standards for the pet day care industry. The Joint Municipalities Committee reported a new draft of the bill earlier this month, and copies (S2731/H4564) are now sitting in the House and Senate committees on Ways and Means awaiting further action.
“In Massachusetts, we have a lot of regulation for a lot of things. One of the things we do not have regulation for is pet day care and boarding facilities,” Ally Blanck of ARL Boston told the room full of animal activists.
The bill would ensure “really reasonable regulation to ensure that animals at these facilities are safe,” she said. Areas of focus would include insurance, staff-to-dog ratios, and requirements around housing and fire safety.
“This is not a thing that’s isolated,” Blanck said. “This is named after one animal, but unfortunately, at this point you know that this happens about every other week in Massachusetts. We know that folks are really nervous when they board their pet because they don’t feel like they can board their pet safely.”
The bill’s namesake, Ollie, was a Labradoodle from Longmeadow who died after he was severely injured while in the care of a day care facility in 2020.
A related bill was sent to study last session. This term’s redrafted version, led by Rep. Brian Ashe and Sen. Mark Montigny, has picked up dozens of cosponsors.
“When we leave our animals in those places, we expect they’re going to get the very best of care,” Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr said Tuesday.
Tarr cosponsored one of the coalition’s other wish list bills (H 3245), which would stop circuses and traveling shows from parading elephants, big cats, primates, bears, and giraffes. Life in such a roadshow means “extreme confinement, abusive training, and few opportunities to express natural behaviors,” according to a summary sheet.
Available housing can be hard to find in Massachusetts, and it can be even more difficult for those trying to find housing that also accepts their pet, advocates said Tuesday. A third priority bill (H1367/S876) aims to break down roadblocks by “preventing certain types of publicly-funded housing as well as renters and homeowners insurance companies from discriminating based on a dog’s perceived breed.”
Mike Keiley, director of adoption centers for MSPCA-Angell, said the housing bill is “crucial to our adoption programs” as well as “our initiatives at the MSPCA to help keep people and pets together.”
“One of the things I treasured during COVID was how we all remembered how close family is, and how pets are part of our family. And to think about people being separated from part of their family because of the size or breed of the dog — it just feels like it’s time to move on from that,” Keiley told the News Service.
The availability of pet-friendly housing during the present statewide housing crunch is also impacting “our ability to staff our hospitals and our shelters in the Boston area,” Keiley said. Veterinarians and veterinary technicians interested in working here “can’t find housing for their dog, and so they end up declining positions, simply because they can’t find housing.”
The circus bill is before House Ways and Means, and copies of the housing bill are before both House and Senate Ways and Means panels.
Tarr warned advocates that their proposals would be competing for oxygen with some heavy-hitters as July 31 approaches.
“In the time between now and the end of July, we have a lot of things to get done in this building,” he advised the crowd. “We have to pass a state budget. We have an economic development bill that’s very important. We have a housing bill that’s critically important. And in the bandwidth that we have, among all those things, we have to include some of these priority pieces of legislation.”