I don't see how you can say it is "not so bad". You can't look at laws and because there are some good parts and some bad parts, take the average and say it is neutral. This law, if passed as it was originally written, would have made large numbers of people into criminals, just because they owned a tank of fish, and also had a job, so their fish tank was not staffed 24/7. That is bad! There is no possible other way to look at it!
If tighter regulation is needed on some things to decrease animal cruelty and neglect, then a law should be written that addresses those specific things.
A law that oversteps its bounds as badly as this one did, even though there is absolutely nothing cruel about leaving a fish tank unattended for the majority of the day, is not an acceptable way of dealing with some relatively isolated issues of cruelty or neglect to cats & dogs.
And to clarify, before anyone jumps in and says that the cruelty issues are way too common to be called isolated...they are extremely isolated in comparison to the number of people who would have been turned into criminals due to owning 50 or more fish, or snakes, or rodents, etc. A law that makes more criminals out of "innocent bystanders" than its intended target, is definitely a bad law.
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