You'd think someone ran a pickup over a couple dozen hounds' tails, the way they howled up in Raleigh Tuesday. That "Puppy Chow penalty" got folks all riled up. Imagine that - asking animal owners to kick in a few bucks to solve the big-time animal problems we've got here. Next thing you know, they'll want to tax drivers to pay for highway maintenance, or property owners to pay for city services. What a notion.

The howls came from some dog owners - mostly hunters and breeders. Their arena wasn't a kennel or a sporting trial, but rather a legislative meeting room in Raleigh, where a crowd of 300 took part in a four-hour meeting that reviewed new legislative proposals aimed at reversing this state's dreadful track record of generating, and euthanizing, unwanted pets at twice the national rate.

In most North Carolina communities, animal welfare is a concept rooted in 19th century practices and programs. It goes like this: Let them breed, scoop up the strays, cage them in foul, unhealthy kennels, then kill them. Nearly a quarter of a million North Carolina dogs and cats met that fate last year.

Ironically, the state has offered help for low-cost spaying and neutering programs for years. Most communities (including this one) ignored it. Just as they ignore the foundation grants out there that would help cut down on the unwanted animal population. Easier to rely on the old scoop 'em, cage 'em, kill 'em plan.

After a winter of hearings, a House study committee has proposed some advances into the 21st century, key among them a well-financed spay-neuter program. The money would come from a small tax on animal food. The plan would add 10 cents to a 20-pound bag of dry food and 2 cents to every can. In my household, with two largish dogs and one slightly plump cat, that might amount to an extra buck a month, at most.

Those pennies would add up to an $8 million-a-year fund that would help animal shelters meet the new law's requirement that dogs and cats released from shelters must first be sterilized.

That is a far better answer to our pet overpopulation than the present system, which either kills the extras or warehouses them in no-kill shelters that are hardly the optimum life for what we lovingly call our "companion animals."

Maybe it makes sense to you and me, but to some people in the Animal Establishment, it was cause for unrestrained yelps. "I think it's going to be an inconvenience for everybody," said the representative from the Grimesville Hunt Club. The man from the North Carolina Coon Hunters Association saw it this way: "When you tell a farmer down the road with two collies that he's going to have to pay $200 more this year, he's not going to be up to vote for you next time." If the farmer's got to pay $200 more for two collies, they've got one heck of an appetite. To pay $200, at 10 cents tax per 20 pound bag, the farmer down the road is feeding his two collies 40,000 pounds of dry food a year, or nearly 110 pounds a day. Those are big collies!

But that's the way it's going to go. The hunters, breeders (including the folks who breed for fighting) and the pet food industry are going to hound this proposal all over the place, maybe to death. It's a mostly quiet constituency, but they've got clout.

So if you want to see this county, and the other 99, come into the 21st century with an intelligent program that cuts down on the mind-boggling numbers of pets that are killed in county shelters every year, let your local lawmakers know that you support the state's new spay-neuter initiative. We all can afford a few pennies a week to stop the slaughter.

Tim White is the Observer's editorial page editor. He can be reached at 486-3504 or twhite@fayettevillenc.com.