Unwilling to concede defeat, Virginia Hemingway and volunteers worked through the weekend and on Monday to gather signatures for a ballot initiative to ask voters for tougher penalties in Idaho’s law. State lawmakers passed the state’s first felony animal cruelty law this year, but many advocates say it didn’t go far enough. Hemingway said the coalition of animal-welfare advocates, called Idaho 1 of 3 because Idaho was one of three states that didn’t have a felony on the books for animal cruelty, collected signatures from more than 30,000 registered voters. That means they probably won’t reach the required 47,000-plus signatures needed by Tuesday’s deadline/Katy Moeller, Idaho Statesman. More here.

Question: How tough do you want Idaho's animal cruelty laws to be?

An Athol woman was cited for misdemeanor animal cruelty after a Kootenai County sheriff’s deputy found her border collar heeler mix in a vacant yard with its mouth duct-taped shut Wednesday morning. The deputy found the woman’s unleashed dog at 30450 Railroad Street & Highway 54 after KCSD fielded an anonymous tip. A woman from across the street admitted to the officer that “Blue” was her dog and that she’d taped his mouth shut the previous day b/c she didn’t want him biting a friend’s two Pomeranians. The friend left between 10 and 11 o’clock the previous night. She told the officer that she hadn’t taken the tape off the dog’s mouth because it was difficult to get off. Also, she admitted that she had taped the dog’s mouth before, insisting that the tactic was “better than it killing something.” When the deputy advised her that it was not allright to tape the dog’s mouth shut, the woman responded: “I know that.”

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