The people and the animals deserve a better system

The recent referendum overturning the county’s new Multiple Pet Permit ordinance came as no surprise.

What is disheartening is that Mariposa County spent three and a half years rewriting its dog ordinances only to produce something that was intrusive in some places, too lenient in others, constitutionally questionable and completely disconnected from community expectations.

This wasn’t a one-time mistake — it’s part of a long pattern showing that Mariposa County is still not taking dog enforcement or public safety seriously enough.

For years, residents across the county have reported dangerous dog situations, repeated enforcement failures and the same stories of nothing changing. The county has been on notice for a long time that our dog ordinances were outdated, inconsistently applied and not protecting people.

Yet years passed without meaningful reform. Only two words were added to the Dangerous Dog section: “or livestock.”

My own situation has been publicly referenced by members of the board of supervisors as a reason the ordinances needed updating. And while I understand why my case gets mentioned, I want to be very clear: I am not the only person who has been harmed by the county’s policies, by the lack of enforcement, and by the gaps in the system.

Many residents have faced the same dangers, and many continue to deal with preventable harm. When my experience is used publicly to justify reform, yet the county still fails to fix the conditions that caused that harm, it becomes impossible not to see this as a systemic failure — one the county has known about for years and still has not corrected.

After two dog-versus-chicken attacks, it has now been three and a half years since I was told — by Animal Control, the District Attorney, County Counsel and by members of the board — that the county “had no enforcement options” because the ordinances were deficient.

And after all this time, we still have ordinances that don’t fix enforcement gaps, don’t improve accountability and don’t prevent public-safety incidents. The fact that the new ordinance fell apart almost immediately shows something deeper is wrong — not with a single ordinance, but with the entire process that produced it.

My chickens were killed because every single layer of the county’s enforcement structure failed to act despite years of warnings. The dog owner had the primary legal duty to confine and control their animals, but once the unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs repeatedly roamed, repeatedly threatened neighbors, displayed dangerous and aggressive behavior and killed livestock, Animal Control had a mandatory obligation under county code to investigate, classify the dogs as dangerous and order secure confinement or immediate impoundment.

The sheriff’s office, which oversees Animal Control, was responsible for ensuring those enforcement actions occurred. The District Attorney had a duty to pursue criminal violations and seek court orders once the dogs’ dangerous behavior became clear and County Counsel had the responsibility to initiate civil nuisance actions and support enforcement when the pattern escalated.

Collectively, each of these agencies had a defined role in preventing exactly this kind of harm—and each failed to act.

Enforcement in Mariposa County should not fall on Animal Control alone. Animal Control officers are often placed in impossible positions — expected to handle dangerous situations without sufficient ordinances, training support or the structural backing they need.

Public safety requires action from the sheriff’s office, county counsel, the district attorney’s office and county administration, each of which has its own legal and operational responsibilities for enforcing state law and local ordinances.

And while the sheriff oversees Animal Control, it is ultimately the board of supervisors that writes the ordinances, funds the departments and creates the enforcement system. When that legal framework is weak, contradictory or unconstitutional, the responsibility falls squarely on the board.

And when the system breaks down, residents are left without the protections the county is supposed to provide — a failure so serious that multiple residents, myself included, were told by county authorities to “shoot the dogs,” effectively shifting enforcement responsibilities onto the public.

That is not a safety strategy. It is not a real policy — yet in practice, it has become the county’s de facto one. And it is absolutely not an acceptable substitute for county enforcement.

The dogs that destroyed my business did so in a residential neighborhood. Residents should never be told to handle dangerous situations themselves because the county has failed to create or enforce a functional system.

The referendum passed because the ordinance was poorly written and poorly constructed. Setting the threshold at 10 dogs — the highest number in any comparable ordinance in the state — defies both logic and common practice. And the mandatory home inspections — adopted without considering basic constitutional concerns — only deepened public distrust.

This is not how strong, reliable public policy is created. And it is not how we protect the community from harm that has become entirely predictable.

We are still not addressing the deeper issues in how dog-related public safety is handled in Mariposa County. Part of the deeper issue is animal welfare itself — because dogs that are cared for, contained and properly supervised don’t create community safety problems.

What we call “dangerous dogs” is almost always a failure of ownership, not a failure of the animals. Until the county addresses the root causes, residents will continue to be exposed to the same dangers that prompted these reforms.

None of this was unpredictable. None of this was unavoidable. Every one of these harms was preventable if the county had acted when it knew there was a problem. People — and animals — deserve better than a system that waits until someone is hurt before it responds.

Updating the dog ordinance should have involved real public workshops, open conversations, clear drafting and a sense of urgency about public safety and animal welfare. This referendum shows just how many people have been affected by these failures — and how many are asking the county to finally take this seriously.

Mariposa County residents — and the animals and livestock that depend on us — deserve a safer, more responsible system.

Brenda Ostrom is a resident
of Mariposa County.