Finch Fuzz Say Respect My Authoritah — In the early morning two days after the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal/New Era carried a feel-good feature about how a grandmother nursed back to health a house finch found by her German shepherd and how the bird became a pet and followed her around the house singing, a Pennsylvania Game Commission Officer and three armed cops showed up at her door with a warrant.
They wanted the bird. Yes, the grandmother, Pati Mattrick, — OK, she’s a 57-year-old grandmother — had broken the law . Apparently it is illegal in this state to heal a sick bird. One must turn it over to licensed “rehabbers”.
The incident happened in May but is now starting to percolate into the rest of the state and, unfortunately, the nation. Having fools and petty tyrants in authority are never things about which one should boast.
Hopefully, the accompanying cops were restricted to just one bullet each and prohibited from keeping their service weapons loaded.
Kudos to Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman who seems sincerely ticked. “At best, this case was a grossly misguided abuse of law enforcement discretion,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. ” At worst, it was just plain cruel.”
Earlier this month, he decreed that all game officers go through his office to obtain search warrants rather than simply via a local magistrate.
Finch Fuzz Say Respect My Authoritah
