Your Views for March 25

‘Clean and pure’?

Referring to “A great idea,” Pradeepta Chowdhury’s letter (Your Views, March 21): Uh … don’t want to go there! That would open a bottomless can of worms.

We all know our state and U.S. representatives and senators are clean and pure as the driven snow and above reproach. Isn’t that why “we” keep electing them?

Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less about our president’s tax returns. The only reason the Democrats are demanding them is to provide more fodder for the Democrat-controlled news media to pick them apart.

All these years, I have been misled to think it was the Internal Revenue Service’s job, through their audits.

Ron Baptista

Mountain View

Stop tethering

Regarding “Activists sink teeth into dog tethering legislation” (Tribune-Herald, March 20): We applaud any efforts to protect dogs and we hope Senate Bill 700, which would strengthen regulations on tethering, encourages communities to do even more, by banning tethering entirely.

Even when tethered for a short time, dogs are in danger of weather extremes, disease and parasites and cruel humans who shoot, stab, poison and set them on fire. They also can strangle when they hang themselves on fences and, should they break their tethers, run onto busy streets.

Many tethered dogs also are denied exercise, veterinary care and what these social pack animals crave most: love and companionship.

Tethering puts the public at risk, too. Intense confinement and deprivation can cause tethered dogs to become overly territorial and aggressive. They are three times as likely to bite as dogs that are not tethered.

Since 2003, at least 450 people — most of them children — have been injured or killed nationwide by dogs that were tethered.

Dogs are part of the family. They should live indoors with the rest of their pack.

Craig Shapiro

PETA Foundation

Norfolk, Va.