Romney dogged by animal cruelty charge

Leave it to Ana Marie Cox over at Time to have fun with this anecdote from today's installment of the Globe's Mitt Romney series:

The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario ... Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family's hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon's roof rack. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Cox cites a provision in Massachusetts law making it illegal to transport a pet "in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon." And she gets reaction from Ingrid Newkirk, president of the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who likens Romney's treatment of old Seamus to "torture."

"In the case of the dog on the roof of the car, if this is true, quite remarkably it obviously wasn't for show as only his own children were watching, a lesson in cruelty that was also wrong for them to witness," Cox quotes Newkirk as saying. "If you wouldn’t strap your child to the roof of your car, you have no business doing that to the family dog! I don't know who would find that acceptable."

But Romney's treatment of Seamus is no match for what Bill Frist, the former Senate majority leader and one-time presidential candidate, did to cats. When Frist was in medical training in Boston in the 1970s, he used to go around to animal shelters, adopt cats, and promise to care for them as pets. Then he killed them in experiments.

"It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," Frist wrote in an autobiography. "I was going a little crazy."