Posted on 05/26/2006 11:25:38 AM PDT by CedarDave
Passing a federal law to help prevent kids and animals from drinking deadly antifreeze could prove tougher than Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) expected.
Wilson is trying to convince her House colleagues to approve a federal version of New Mexico's Scooby's Law, but she met with stiff resistance over environmental and liability concerns in a House subcommittee this week.
Scooby's Law, named after a golden retriever who died in Bernalillo after drinking antifreeze in 2003, would force antifreeze manufacturers to add a bittering agent that discourages animals and young children from drinking the liquid.
The federal bill Wilson has co-sponsored is similar to New Mexico's law, but critics— including Gov. Bill Richardson's office— contend that subtle, but important, differences exist...
Scooby's Law passed the New Mexico Legislature last year with broad bipartisan support. But this week in Congress, some Democrats raised environmental questions about denatonium benzoate, the bittering agent required for inclusion in antifreeze under the federal proposal.
Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Richardson, who endorsed the federal bill in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman earlier this year, has since changed his mind.
[Wilson] pointed out that the bittering additive is already in hundreds of household products and has not been identified as a culprit in any environmental damage. "The risk is quite low in this case for the additive because it's been used for 45 years in hundreds of consumer products," she said in an interview this week.
Wilson said in an interview she suspects trial lawyers are driving the new objections to the bill. "The trial lawyers want to be able to sue everybody for everything ... so they have multiple deep pockets to go to," Wilson said. "I just don't agree with that as a public policy."
(Excerpt) Read more at abqjournal.com ...
I have a hard time believing that there are a significant number of deaths of people or animals from accidentally consuming antifreeze. It's hardly the only common item that's poisonous.
The main issue is that when anti-freeze is changed at home and discharged onto the driveway or in the street, a dog will drink it because it's sweet. Out here, not withstanding laws to the contrary, dogs are frequently loose and drink the stuff. They shouldn't be made to pay with their life for both their owner's and the auto owner's irresponsibility.
There may be people who have used it to poison other people's pets, but making antifreeze taste bad simply removes antifreeze as one of many, many common things they could poison them with.
Hadn't thought of it being used for that. But besides dogs, cats and other wildlife are at risk, though I don't know whether birds have a sense of taste.
Is there really a significant need for this law, or is it just another of the many mostly useless laws our government debates and often passes just to act like they do something?
Very good question. Whatever the answer, it has been caught up in election year politics.
Which is of no help when your dog, or wild birds, licks the stuff from a puddle in the street. California condors have died this way.
It's strongly suspected that Scooby was poisoned by a jerk of a neighbor. Anti-freeze has long been the cowards choice in killing dogs.
We ought to have a Teddy's Law to add a bittering agent to Chivas Regal.
If you've ever seen the old Looney Toon cartoons where the cat gets fed alum so he can't eat the bird and his mouth draws up into the size of a tic-tac - that's exactly what it tasted like - bitter beyond belief.
Letting your dog wander around in the middle of the street will get him run over, too.
LoL I better check it out in the interests of learning. "wwiirrritt, Rover come here."
Sorry, but I just have a hard time passing a law (especially at the federal level) to in any way effect a change in the way we flavor our anti-freeze. Dead dogs, and birds notwithstanding, the federal code needs to be stripped of thousands of such laws as it is, not more added.
R.I.P Scooby
There are around 5,000 cases of accidental human poising with EG a year, resulting in around 10 deaths and around 200 serious disabilities - the fatalities are so low because GE poising can be treated if identified prompt. Yearly animal death estimates vary widely, forvexample from a low of 10,000 to more than 100,000 for dogs alone.
AND eating their own sh**! They can't actually have a sense of taste can they?
Rinking the Rantifreeze...
Legally, that would be classified as negligence. Having a sweet-tasting deadly poison that can easily be accidentally left on the kind of residential streets where you normally would exercise your dog is a whole other matter.
Legally, spilled antifreeze is called an "attractive nuisance", just like a swimming pool. Just as pools must be fenced to keep unsupervised kids out, adding a bittering agent to antifreeze should be a no-brainer. It should be part of the industry standard for manufacturing the product.
One of the rules of changing your own antifreeze is to spray the runoff with a hose so there aren't any puddles with any significant concentrations of antifreeze.
I learned that from my father likely before I was out of elementary school, as did most kids where I grew up.
I don't know much antifreeze it takes to make an animal seriously sick, but while I was taught to be careful with the runoff, I never heard of an actual incident where accidental poisoning of a pet was suspected.
Antifreeze has been used for many decades, and I doubt that owners changing their own antifreeze has increased, and the stories of problems have been pretty rare.
I'm sure it is a strong emotional issue, because it always hurts to lose a pet, but I'm skeptical that this is an issue where government regulation can improve things significantly, rather than just being burdensome.
Why hasn't a company that makes anti-freeze taken it upon itself to "ruin" the taste of anti-freeze? I would think that would be a big PR coup, not to mention a great ad campaign.
All the others would quickly follow suit.
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