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 Carmencita has her license tag displayed. / Emily Sprague photo assisted by her sister, Sofia A curious WAG investigates
I'm Carmencita, a small brown Arlington mutt with boundless curiosity.
My beagle-Corgi tail curls back toward my head like a question mark. I'm just
walking curiosity. I've been that way ever since I was born in Puerto
Rico and came to live in Arlington in 2004, when the Sprague-Howard
family adopted me.
I like to sniff at everything, and sniffing raises questions. Here's
the latest: Is the license I wear on the collar around my neck an example of faud?
Someone writing on the Arlington e-mail list this summer thinks so. My owner told me, in paraphrase, what he wrote:
Arlington taxpayers are paying the town so they can supply them with information
the town already has -- for example, when your dog gets a rabies vaccine, that information
is sent to the clerk's office, and when you register your dog at the clerk's office, you give them the same information.
Yip, yip, yip! That news gave me barking fit.
Ya mean my owners have been paying needlessly all these years? Well, that's hardly fair. An airline program rescued me from the streets of San Juan, and my owners paid for me over at Buddy Dog. I could at least save them some dough.
I needed to look into this canine injustice. Who would know?
Most recent town licensing bylaw (1988)
My owner said a lot of people on the Arlington list were offering opinions, but none of them nailed the answer, it seemed.
See what Stephanie Lucarelli at the town clerk's office knows, my owner said. So, let out on work-release recently, I trotted over to Town Hall with a written note in my mouth and padded up to the second floor. Eager citizens were at the counter asking all kinds of knotty questions that a clerk's office was built to answer. Surely, I could ask mine.
But I was too short for anyone to see me, so I tip-toed around to where Steph sits, and she took the paper from my mouth.
Reading between the teeth marks and drool, she scowled and then composed the following answer. My owner read it to me when I got home:
"The fee we charge for a dog license isn't used to supply us with the same information we already have. The money we receive from dog licenses goes into the Town's General Fund.
"By State Law, vets are required to send us rabies certificates, but not all vets comply with this law. When someone comes into our office to license their dog, most of the time they do not have their rabies certificates with them.
"We either look up the information under our certificates (sent to us by the vets) or we call the vet to verify the dog had its shot. We cannot license a dog without verification.
"Most of our dog licenses are done through the mail and usually no information is included. We look back on a previous license or check our records.
"The certificate of neutering/spaying is only required to be shown the first time they license their dog.
"By law, the dog tag and the rabies certificate have to be displayed on the dog.
"The fee for a dog license is determined by Town Meeting.
"The bylaw to license dogs and charge a fee was [first] adopted by Town Meeting in March 1854."
Now I thought that was a pretty complete answer.
I thought it made clear that one man's fraud is another's reasonable regulation.
So I went on to sniff into other questions. After a long nap -- investigating things make a pooch sleepy -- I spied out of the corner of my eye the little metal reddish tag hooked to my collar. My license!
And what does it say? (My owner helped me find out.)
"Mass. license Arlington 0091."
What is that date on the license?
"2005."
Holy dogpound, Batman! That's three years ago.
I'm illegal.
Please don't tell anyone.
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Enuma Elish
performs "Metropolis" Thursday, Nov. 20, at 8 p.m. at the Regent
Theater. General admission...
