Overzealous Florida Health Inspectors Now Targeting Nationally-Adored Puppies

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© LET CODY STAY!!!

The network of health regulations we’ve built is vitally important and wildly successful. Invested as they are with sweeping bureaucratic authority – and availing themselves of a broad array of institutional levers – health inspectors have all but abolished many contaminants that just a century ago were veritable plagues. No longer are there widespread rat-filled meat warehouses or cockroach-infested kitchens. Bravo.

Here’s the thing though. The beauty of the inspection regime is that it catches sources of contamination that customers aren’t aware of or might not see. It protects us from the dangers inherent in an impersonal and far-flung system of food production. What it’s not supposed to do is hate puppies, which is apparently is the mandate that the Florida Department of Agriculture thinks it has:

Cody, a chocolate Labrador, has for months greeted customers at the Clearwater BP gas station and convenience store at U.S. 19 and Nursery Road… thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the canine’s drive-through window presence spawned hundreds of positive responses from across the country… a state health inspector put an end to Cody’s stint as a convenience store clerk. Karim Mansour, the store and dog owner, received a warning: Remove the dog or the Florida Department of Agriculture would declare all of Mansour’s food products… unfit for consumption. Mansour… adopted 6-year-old Cody three years ago… His primary violation: “Prohibited animals present in a food establishment. Dog seen in retail area.”

Keep in mind that the store doesn’t even serve hot food or deli sandwiches. Everything is nicely packaged and sealed, protected from whatever dangerous germs a 3 year old chocolate lab might impart to a package of Slim Jims. Can you believe these pedantic, scolding, nanny state tools? Chichi cafes all over Europe allow dogs to sit alongside customers “in a food establishment.” But a lonely BP off US 19, where an adopted puppy has kept its owner company for 3 years – verboten!

It’d be one thing if customers were getting taken by surprise. But we have a feeling that there’s general awareness of Cody and the marginal health risks he poses to piles of Oreos. One reason we’re confident is that there are weepy YouTube videos begging health inspectors to let him stay. Another reason is the Facebook group of 7,000+ fans who have made Code a cause celebre. Profile blurb: “Cody is a good, clean dog who brightens peoples day! Don’t make him leave!” So we think the secret’s out.

The Department’s excuse: if we let one store do it we have to let all stores do it. No you don’t. Regulators have discretion to issue findings based on their judgment, which is one of the things we pay them to do. And if they don’t have that discretion we should rewrite the rules so they do, thereby making the system ever so slightly less mindless and automated.

Stupid.

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