Regulate Poison

I think the sheer volume of the stuff that is sold would make this idea unworkable. If for instance, a mere 50 units of poisons are sold each week across Canberra, that makes 200 individual sales a month, 2600 a year and so on. Do you think the police have the resources to investigate each of these sales on the off chance that the culprit would go ‘yeah, fair cop guvnor, it were me wot done it’?

Me neither.

FOTW ?

Well and good, but such a scheme falls on its arse in two very serious ways, goose.

1. How the hell are you supposed to keep track of all the purchases? Will business bear the cost of the extra administration? How will the keep the information (there are privacy concerns in keeping people’s ID details.
2. Are the police really going to mount a full scale investigation because someone’s dog got poisoned?

It’s sad as hell what happened in Richardson. If it happened to my dog I’d be inconsolable. However, knee-jerk calls for “the Gubbmint to do something” don’t help, will just be a burden on business and won’t stop the kind of sicko’s who do this from doing it.

Great idea! Why not require the same for snail bait, or anything else marked “Poison” for that matter. Of course your next post will establish the link between buying something, showing some ID, and involving the police. I’m sure shopkeepers will have their license registers and CCTV tuned and ready to go. Of course if I buy some and you come in and buy some they can differentiate if one of us was up to no good just by having shown our licenses. Goose seems appropriate. Time to punch out maybe?

“Why are there no controls on the sale of x? You can walk into any x store and purchase x. I believe some form of ID needs to be produced before being allowed to purchase x. This way, Police would be able to track down customers who purchased these items in case we have another y.”

x = hammers, nails, wood, metal, chainsaw, buckets, dogs, sausages, off meat, poison tuna, spaceships, death satellites, travis heinrich dignity, snails, snail power, beth

y = current hot but depressing issue

you can walk into any store and buy something that potentially can kill. lets just ban everything then.

this was obviously done by disturbed individual/s who had a grievance with the victims and their dogs. Instead of handling it with maturity and common sense, they resorted to a despicable and deplorable act. banning rat poison wouldn’t stop that sort of thing.

Why are there no controls on the sale of knives etc… You can walk into any kitchen store and purchase these goods. I believe some form of ID needs to be produced before being allowed to purchase these goods. This way, Police would be able to track down customers who purchased these items in case we have another stabbing saga.

reading between the lines should show my opinion on this topic

Given how common rat poison is, all this will do is give the coppers a list of consecutive list of house numbers in a street.

I think back to the old slogan of “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”, and restricting rat poison by requesting your ID just makes it a pain for the good guy.

The logistics don’t work, imagine for a moment that the police have a list with the (guessing) 20,000 Canberrans who bought rat poison in the last few years. What are they going to do with it? Let alone the people who bought the stuff in NSW.

Nice thought but recording details of people who buy poison is unlikely to be useful. How many thousands of people do you think buy rat poison in any given week in Canberra? Also, it isn’t as though there is any way to identify where a block of poison found in some dog’s stomach was bought. It’s not as though rat poison is the only way to poison a dog either.

After living in Canberra for 7 years, I never really thought random dog poisoning was a huge problem anyway.

I agree. There should also be controls on the sale of glass or glass-related products less they be ground into food, anything that can be used to cut, scissors and all customers to stationary and hardware stores must present a valid drivers licence and provide a scan of their thumb before being allowed to enter.

Oh, wait, no, I disagree.

If someone really wants to get hold of rat poison for the purpose you are suggesting, they are not going to go to a hardware store and register, they will just get it some other way. Or use petrol, or something else that produces the desired effect.

my opinion is the idea is moronic.
alot of other things could be used to poison dogs.

I’d just like to point out that this would be a huge PITA for the very many people who just want to poison some rats. Besides, unless it’s trackable, how will it deter anyone? But making it trackable would be very hard work for far too little benefit.

It’s worthwhile with bulk fertiliser, because most people don’t need it in quantity, so you can track those who buy it and anyone who doesn’t have a sizeable garden or farm is probably the one making backyard bombs 😉 Rat poison? It’s a much more common purchase. If supermarkets etc had to comply, they’d stop selling it to save the hassle.

Besides, it’d only turn these people to nastier methods, like the ground glass that was fed to our poor black lab, many years ago in Queensland.