Reactionaries in SF Seek Return to Days of Microwaved Kittehs

The Chronicle reports that San Francisco -- the city that gave leather chaps a bad name -- is considering casting pet stores into the outer darkness:

Sell a guinea pig, go to jail.

That's the law under consideration by San Francisco's Commission of Animal Control and Welfare. If the commission approves the ordinance at its meeting tonight, San Francisco could soon have what is believed to be the country's first ban on the sale of all pets except fish.

That includes dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.

"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don't know what they're getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That's what we'd like to stop."

But San Fran's city fathers mothers parents care-givers seem to have forgotten the bad old days, when guinea pigs died from botched back-alley euthanizations performed with dirty coat-hangers; when kittehs and peeps died horrible deaths in under-powered microwave ovens. Euthanasia for our non-human fellow beings should be safe, legal, and paid for by British Petroleum.