First Post!

I'm back to being an official volunteer at Town Lake Animal Center in Austin (Yay!), after a 2 month break, so I guess now is the right time to start documenting my experiences there. I was not allowed to be a volunteer for two months, because I would not give my social security number to the city of Austin. They have decided that volunteers need to undergo criminal background investigations (cbis) in order to keep volunteering to protect children from sex offenders. In order to run a background check, you need a name. Possibly a date of birth if the name is common and a search returns something. You don't need a social security number. However, the city said that if we didn't give them our ssn, we couldn't be volunteers. We offered to go to the city courthouse and have a cbi run, at our expense, so that we didn't have to give them the information, but they wouldn't accept that.



Well, after enough complaining, 2 months later they have told us that we can return as volunteers and do not have to give them our social security numbers. So now I'm officially back, although not much has changed. I was still able to go and work and hang out with the dogs as a member of the community when I was not allowed to be an official volunteer. But for some strange psychological reason, it does feel better to be an official volunteer now, so I'm pretty excited to have this behind me.



Why was I so against giving up my social security number? I have two main reasons. The first is the new Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which was passed in 2006. The law turns anyone into a "terrorist" who "intentionally damages or causes the loss of any property (including animals or records) used by the animal enterprise, or conspires to do so.” Many groups have argued that profits could be considered property and people utilizing their First Amendment rights, like organizing boycotts of companies who are mistreating animals (and thus, affecting profits), could be punished. See the Humane Society's response here: http://www.hsus.org/web-files/PDF/109_AETA_factsheet.pdf



Anyway, I suppose I've become paranoid over these last couple of years. I'm not giving my social security number up so that the government can easily start a profile of me.



The second reason is that I don't trust the city to keep my information safe. Not long after we learned of the city's intention with the cbi, TLAC "accidentally" gave out all of our email addresses to an outside party for lobbying purposes. So I don't have a whole lot of confidence in the city and their processes.



Ok, great, so now that I have all of that documented and behind me, I hope to move forward and post on current issues at TLAC.