Steven Furlong wrote:

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US. We have the 2nd Amendment, which keeps some of the police state behavior at bay. I can't think, offhand, of any provision in the US Constitution which would prevent City Hall from mandating a hair sample from every pet.

As Tim pointed out, they're not trying to force every cat herder to provide a sample of cat hairs. They're trying to get a reasonably broad spectrum of cat fur samples (about 1600), so they can find the genetic differences between them, which will make it easier to use cat hair as evidence, or at least easier to tell whether it's usable. It may be that they'll find that it's easy to tell that there's a 90% or 99% or 99.99% chance that the cat hair found on the suspect was from the victim's cat Snowball as opposed to the suspect's cat Mehitabel, or it may be they'll find that one white cat hair looks about like another. Most cats have multiple colors of hair, so color alone isn't always indicative, though I can usually tell which cat the cat hairs on my computer keyboard are from. As far as mandating hair samples goes, not that they're doing that, if they can require you to get a license to possess a dog, they could include hair samples as part of the process; they could also require licenses for cats. Actual genetic testing of millions of cat hair samples would be prohibitively expensive, but storing samples for analyzing if there's a specific need for it wouldn't be as difficult. But it's still a big expense and hassle, and it'd be much simpler to get a warrant and collect samples from the victims' and suspects' houses or cats when needed. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639