Rome bans goldfish bowls
Parodied by Memphis Steve for obvious reasons
ROME (Reuters) - The city of Rome has banned goldfish bowls, which animal rights terrorists say are cruel. Rome has also made regular dog-walks mandatory in the Italian capital, the town's council said Tuesday. Also, seatbelts must be worn, except in government-owned vehicles such as buses. Child seats are mandatory in all vehicles, again except government-owned vehicles in which everyone may leap and run about as they please. And no one in Rome is permitted to walk and chew gum at the same time.
"It's just too dangerous," Fettucini Alfredo, representative of Rome was quoted as saying. "Someone might trip and fall."
The classic spherical fish bowls are banned under a new by-law which also stops fish or other animals being given away as fairground prizes. It comes after a national law was passed to allow jail sentences for people who abandon cats or dogs. Also, cats are to be worshipped as gods and everyone is required to stop and pray to the sun each day at noon.
"It's good to do whatever we can for our animals who in exchange for a little love fill our existence with their attention," said Monica Cirinna, the councilor behind the by-law and world-renowned "crazy old cat lady."
"The civilization of a city can also be measured by this," she told Rome daily Il Messaggero as she held her tiny pet Chiwawa which she had lovingly dressed in a purple silk "Huggy Bear" suit and purple felt fedora. "He's my little pimp daddy."
The newspaper reported that round bowls caused fish to go blind and encourage masturbation, which also causes blindness, as well as hairy palms. No one at Rome council was available to confirm that this was why they were banned, because most of the councilors were too busy dropping acid and staring at the sun to comment. Many fish experts say round bowls provide insufficient oxygen for fish and leave too little room for them to run from cats, who as was mentioned previously must now be worshipped as Roman gods.
"My pussy is named Olympuss," councilor Cirinna announced proudly.
In July 2004, parliament passed a law setting big fines and jail terms for people who abandon pets and since then local governments have added their own animal welfare rules many of which will be difficult to police and are just plain gay. [And by gay I mean dumb, as gay in and of itself doesn't mean homosexual anyway, in case you were about to get all pissy. Gay actually means happy. But if the homosexual groups can say a rainbow means gay and gay means homosexual then I can say that gay means dumb, which is what it meant when I was in school. So get the fuck over it.]
[and now, back to the article ...]
The northern city of Turin passed a law in April to fine pet owners up to 500 euros if they do not walk their dogs at least three times a day. Since this law was passed almost all dog owners have taken their pets to Sicily and abandonded them.
"Some of us have to work," laborer Franchesco Pizzaria stated. "We can't be walking our dogs and worshipping our cats or the sun all freaking day long. We live in the real world, unlike these stupid pot-smoking, cat-lady, hippie lawyers who are ruining our country."
The new Roman by-law requires owners to regularly exercise their dogs, and bans them from docking their pets' tails for aesthetic reasons. It prohibits disciplining pets in any way for any reason and requires that all animals wear clothes and sleep in beds.
It also provides legal recognition in the form of huge golden calf statues in city courtyards for cat lovers who provide food for the colonies of strays which live everywhere from the city's ancient Roman ruins to modern office car parks.
Animal rights groups estimate (and by 'estimate' we mean 'pulled this out of their ass') that around 150,000 pet dogs and 200,000 cats are abandoned in Italy every year. Human rights groups estimate that around 1.5 million pet dogs were taken out of the country and dumped following the passage of these laws, and 4 million cats were drowned or merely 'accidently' let out of the house without identification tags and abandonded.
"Once again, the do-gooder drug-addicted socialists have tried to save our souls only to cause far greater suffering for the very souls they claimed they were helping, in this case pets," said an old man who wished to remain anonymous for fear the PETA Gestapo would detain and torture him. "We have seen this before, this fascism disguised as good deeds. I am old enough to remember the last regime that enshrined this sort of madness into law."
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