The fix is in

On tuesday, the same day as the final rounds of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, the dogs and cats of Los Angeles lost their reproductive rights. After an often contentious bureaucratic journey, the City Council, by a vote of 14 to 1, passed an ordinance that requires pet owners to spay or neuter all dogs and cats by the age of 4 months. You have to wonder if the pets sprawled on the floor in front of the televised dog show felt some form of unconscious resentment. After all, it's one thing to sacrifice your fertility for the common good. It's quite another to watch the incontrovertible evidence that to be a champion, you need to be not only purebred and perfectly proportioned, you need all your parts.

Of course, not everyone likes all that this implies. In five cities, stations airing the dog show ran a series of anti-breeding and pro-animal-birth-control ads put out by the radical animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. (They weren't shown in L.A., but they're posted on the PETA website.)

In one of the ads, a man in a KKK hood enters a meeting of the American Kennel Club and announces that he feels right at home because of the group's belief in the "sanctity of pure bloodlines." In another, parents encourage their teenage daughter to "pop out all the kids you want" because "we can leave them in the shelter or dump them in the street." ("Parents Shouldn't Act This Way. Neither Should People With Dogs and Cats.") In the third spot, a family signs papers for the purebred dog they'll soon receive, only to be presented with what they're told is a dead dog in a plastic garbage bag because "when you buy a dog from a breeder, you kill a dog in a shelter."

Whatever one makes of PETA's message, it's hard to argue against spaying and neutering. There's the very real safety hazard of aggressive, unaltered dogs roaming the streets. More important, according to the Humane Society of the United States, between 6 million and 8 million dogs and cats enter shelters each year nationwide, about half of which are euthanized. Here in L.A., the Department of Animal Services reports that more than a third of the 45,875 animals impounded last year were put to sleep. As bad as that is, it's a significant drop from 2002, and General Manager Ed Boks has said he hopes that the mandatory spay and neuter law will help make us a "no kill" city by 2010.