Colorado's Animal Protection Chief Tweets Against Animal Rights

His Twitter bio reads: "Anti-animal rights, pro animal welfare. Support animal use in ag, exhibition, sporting, and med research." The thousands of tweets he’s posted — many while on the job — include "eat more polar bears" and "success over animal rights is the best revenge." And then there are others that compare the inability to shoot owned animals to the inability to destroy inanimate objects, and criticism of the felony charge for a woman who taped a dog to her refrigerator.

Sounds like the musings of some crackpot, right? The Twitter account, @skinnyhorse, actually belongs to Scot Dutcher, the chief of the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Animal Protection Bureau. That's right, the person who is responsible for looking out for the welfare of animals apparently spends a good deal of his time (at taxpayers' expense, yet) posting decidedly anti-animal tweets.

Last Monday, Holly Tarry, Colorado State Director of the Humane Society of the United States — which Dutcher regularly denounces — confronted his boss, Deputy Commissioner Jim Miller. Denver’s 9News reported that she questioned how Dutcher could be capable of handling his animal welfare job duties, considering his venomous opinion of animal activists.

"There really shouldn't be any reason why organizations shouldn't be able to trust him," Miller responded. "He's always acted in an extremely professional manner." Miller refused to say whether Dutcher had been reprimanded. He said the tweets were "unauthorized" and he had reminded Dutcher about the department policy on social networking.

Dutcher’s tweeting has noticeably dwindled, from the 13 tweets posted on September 12 down to just these two in as many weeks: "Animal owners have a moral obligation to care for the animals in their possession" and "Farmers and ranchers care for their animals!" Those last ones seem to me like a ridiculously obvious, conveniently timed about-face to his thousands of previously hostile tweets.

I’m having difficulty coming up with a reason to trust Dutcher, or finding any evidence that he’s acting extremely professional. Dutcher is Colorado’s lead investigator in the state's animal neglect and cruelty cases — cases including puppy mills, farm animal abuse, dogfighting and, yes, heinous acts like taping a dog to a fridge. Someone in his position should be condoning, not condemning, animal rights advocates. Instead of viewing animals as mere commodities only good for hunting, exhibiting in zoos and using in medical research, he should be recognizing them as living beings that, as research has proven, have actual thoughts and feelings. But his tweets show as little concern for the welfare of animals as for their rights.

It’s not just the content of his tweets and his off-putting bio that make me distrustful of Dutcher’s professionalism. The fact that this "hardworking" employee has been busy spewing his personal viewpoints on taxpayers' dimes, using state computers, should alone be sufficient grounds for his termination.

Please sign the petition demanding the resignation of Scot Dutcher. Coloradoans deserve a chief animal protector who’s an animal lover, not an animal-rights fighter.

Photo credit: fabio rex