Man Faces $500 a Day Fines for Pet Ducks

[Lucille]

How can they? Where the hell has this guy been.*

Man Faces $500 a Day Fines for Pet Ducks
http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/02/ma...-for-pet-ducks

A Pennsylvania man faces fines of $500 a day for having pet ducks the city of Delmont considers poultry, which would be against its zoning laws, according to local CBS affiliate KDKA. The resident, Jim Kistler, points out he’s not planning on eating his pets and that they don’t lay eggs, asking “how can anyone tell you what kind of pet you can have”?

The breed of ducks, Blue Swedish, are actually apparently “great pets because of their calm disposition”. According to LiveDucks.com, ducks are difficult but rewarding pets and the website warns to find out if ducks are legal in your jurisdiction before acquiring one. And ducks aren’t even exotic pets, which face even stricter regulation.

According to KDKA, Kistler is paying $400 to appeal the decision at a hearing later this month. There’s money for towns in zoning enforcement.

Semi-related, here’s a compilation of comedian Mitch Hedberg’s duck routines:

*

The areas of life that remain outside the government’s participation, taxation, subsidization, regulation, surveillance, and other intrusion or control have become so few and so trivial that they scarcely merit mention. We verge ever closer upon the condition in which everything that is not prohibited is required. Yet, the average American will declare loudly that he is a free man and that his country is the freest in the world. Thus, in a country where more and more is for the state, where virtually nothing is outside the State, and where, aside from pointless complaints, nothing against the State is permitted, Americans have become ideal fascist citizens. Like the average German during the years that Hitler ruled Germany, most Americans today, inhabiting one of the most pervasively controlled countries in the history of the world, think they are free. - See more at: http://blog.independent.org/2010/03/....rSfpJthQ.dpuf

[Czolgosz]

Awesome country.