Don 39;t Starve Together Google Drive

[Martha Weitz]

Here today my goal was to talk about revoked driver's license drivers to see how we can help them," said Oletha Faust-Goudeau, D-Wichita, who has long championed efforts to help people with driver's license issues due to unpaid tickets and associated fees.

Faust-Goudeau's legislative proposal calls for, among other provisions, allowing people with revoked licenses to get restricted driving privileges that legally permit them to go get groceries, take children to school and go to work.

Kansas Department of Revenue data show about 208,000 drivers have a suspended license, with roughly 59% of those due to unpaid tickets. About 13,000 drivers have a revoked license, of which about 13% are due to driving while suspended or without insurance and unpaid tickets.

The Legislature's Special Committee on Restricted Driving Privileges, which met last week, was largely in agreement that something should be done to make sure people in poverty don't have their lives upended by a traffic ticket. But legislators and their conferees didn't have a consensus on exactly how to proceed and asked staff for more information prior to an Oct. 10 meeting.

"It is extremely common to find out that somebody lost their driver's license, couldn't drive, lost their job, lost their home, (in) some cases lost their family in the cascading series of disasters that falls out from this extremely bureaucratic and costly process," Harris said. "It's something that we need to look at not only for simply humanity, but as a practical business decision."

"The judge made some effort to work with me, but I just simply didn't have any income because I'd lost my car," Harris said. "And guess what, I lost my job. ... The situation snowballed to the point that I lost my home."

"It is simply unrealistic to expect people to get by without a car in Kansas," Harris said. "In Kansas, you either drive or you starve. And what we're looking at here today is creating a system where people don't starve and where businesses aren't deprived of the necessary resources and human capital to get the job done."

The special committee has brought together influential legislators with leadership roles in transportation, judicial, commerce and local government committees in an attempt to find solutions before the legislative session starts in January.

Howell said despite widespread support for addressing the issue, it has failed to gain much traction in the Legislature. He thinks politicians are "worried about the politics of this, saying we're soft on crime."

Some legislators were interested in proposals by retired Topeka police Chief Ed Klumpp, who now lobbies for a trio of law enforcement organizations. He suggested giving courts more discretion to implement affordable payment plans or community service, among other ideas.

Rep. Shannon Francis, R-Liberal, voiced support for some of Klumpp's proposals, including giving courts flexibility to make arrangements for payment plans, but wanted more information on what other states are doing.

"This issue, I believe, is really about poverty," Howell said. "It's really not a partisan issue. Most of us in this room, myself, if I get a speeding ticket, I'm going to pay my ticket. I think for us, we have the money, we have the wherewithal, to pay our tickets and we learn our lesson and we move on."

"Extracting our citizens from this quagmire requires a command of a labyrinth of state statutes, regulations, municipal and county ordinances," Keenan said. "Along the way Kansas are dealing with fees, fines, reinstatement costs, waiting periods and special rules to return to the road."

The court system can also be difficult to navigate, said Micah Tempel, a Kansas Legal Services attorney. People may take time off of work to try to address the issue with a judge, only to discover they went in on a day the judge is not in.

"Thousands of traffic citations are issued every day," she said. "So we potentially have hundreds and hundreds of payment plans, if they are approved. Right now, there's not a method to just automate this immediately."

"We need to have some of these incentives to make sure that people will get into compliance, that they will make that difficult choice of buying insurance for their car instead of, you know, that pack of cigarettes or the Netflix subscription, or the new pair of shoes or whatever," Breitenbach said. "And I know sometimes it's even more desperate than that, it's how many meals I'm going to eat today, so I don't mean to make light of it.

"But at the end of the day, if someone's going to drive on the roadway where they can run into me or someone that I know or even someone I don't know and cause that person financial harm, then and I want that person to have to have insurance."

Still, Breitenbach said, he supports efforts to prevent people from "being habitually in a suspended driving status, because once you get there, it is hard to get out" and make recommendations for legal changes.

A judge's own life experience may mean some people have a more compelling explanation of why they drove, Brietenbach said, while for others, the story of their situation "may not resonate as much with our bench."

Implementing food into your dogs training can be one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to take things to the next level. Sure, we can train dogs with or without it and of course, we need to make sure that the dog will behave whether we are using it or not. But there is a big difference between a dog just listening and a dog that is cooperatively working alongside you because they WANT to train. Balancing out food and rewards, a good attitude towards training, and fair but clear boundaries and consequences for lack of compliance gets you to a place where you are never so contingent on one technique or tool to long term maintain your dogs training.

But what do you do if your dog is a picky eater? What if they have seemingly no food drive at all? Well luckily that all can be resolved with a few adjustments on your end and you can be off to the races!

In my experience, no dog does NOT have food drive. In fact, no dog is even a picky eater. Most dogs are simply over fed. The acquisition of food is built into your dogs genetic make up which is why it can be such a powerful training tool. Because of this, dogs don't have a natural understanding of self regulating their food intake and will over eat and over eat until they physically can no longer do so resulting in a "grazer"; which is really just a dog that sporadically will gorge themselves to the point of sickness then nibble and skip meals until they are so hungry that they repeat the process. This results in a crunchy or groggy dog, inconsistent bowel movements, and health issues later on. It is up to us to set the necessary schedule for them. Additionally, we tend to give our dogs more high calorie dense treats and edible toys without factoring in all of those calories into our dogs daily food allowance. Due to all of this, our mental image of what a healthy dog should look like has been skewed over time as we have seen more and more out of shape or overweight dogs everywhere. The following steps will help you to get your dog back on track, healthier, and develop their food drive to increase their training!

Typically speaking, this is what we find to be the main culprit of a dog lacking good food drive. Partially because they are getting their daily calorie intake via these things alone (some larger treats can be the equivalent of an entire cup of food) and partially because we are conditioning the dog to expect something a little better than their standard dog food. I'm by no means against you giving your dog these things, but in order to develop a more consistent feeding schedule, we have to temporarily eliminate them and make sure later when you go to add them back in, you adjust your dogs amount of food to factor in the added calories. And who knows, you may find you don't want to give them after all. It's been years since I've used formal treats with my dogs since they are just as motivated to work with their standard dog food.

Once we've eliminated any excess treats, we can then get a baseline of how much you should actually be feeding them. This will vary from dog to dog but there are a few general rules you can follow to get started. Keep in mind that every dog is a little different and going off of what the bag says is a bad place to start as it doesn't factor in your dogs age, breed, activity level, AND dog food companies want to SELL MORE DOG FOOD so they will typically tell you more than what it should actually be. As a reference, my dogs get about 2/3rds the amount that the bag says I should be feeding. For your average dog with moderate exercise, this is usually where I start.

Using my dogs as examples, my two 55-60lb Pitties eat around 3c a day, my 60lb Malinois eats about 4c per day, and my 30lb Mini Labradoodle eats 2c a day. They all are more active than your average dog as well. Again, these are not hard and fast rules but they are somewhere to start as you assess. This also may change if your dog has some weight to lose once you hit your desired weight.

Now that you have your dogs feeding amounts situated, we are going to start the new feeding plan. If your dog has been free feeding, you will be switching to two meals per day. (Time is not important. My dogs eat at different times every day. Amount is all that matters.) If you have a puppy, you can feed three meals a day until they are large enough to digest half of their daily food in one sitting. Take your dogs daily amount and split it in half. For each meal, give the dog roughly 10 minutes. At the end, anything left in the bowl goes away and DOES NOT roll over to the next meal. It is normal for dogs that have been free fed for a while or had inconsistent feeding schedules to skip a meal or two. This is normal. Dogs will not let themselves starve. Continue offering the meals at your designated times and do not try to add anything to the designated amount to entice them more. After the first week of this, you should see an immediate change in your dogs responsiveness to their food. If they are still leaving food in the bowll after the first week, cut the daily amount back more. If your dog begins to drop too much weight, increase it. Repeat this week by week until your dog is very engaged and eats all of their food when it's put down and they are at an appropriate weight.

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