The dog is the one who needs the license, to prove it has a home and has had its shots, and is not a public nuisance or a health hazard.

No one is equipped to have children, except in the biological sense. The idea that people know how to be parents is silly.

You want better parents, teach parenthood formally. Most people don't want to hurt children. What they lack are skills and a social network to support them when the stress is too much. As long as we are unwilling to pay for such services, we will continue to have parents who don't know what they're doing, and don't know how to fix it.

You want fewer parents, teach, and provide, all means of birth control.

As for tests, need I remind you that they don't really measure anything but objective knowledge? They don't measure performance. Who writes the tests? Who decides what's enough to fail you on the parenthood test? Do you get sterilized once you fail? Do you get chemical implants that make you temporarily infertile? If it later turns out that the implants have made you ill, who's going to take care of that?

It's fairly easy to establish what constitutes cruelty to animals, but bad masters aren't always nasty and overtly neglectful. Bad masters don't let retrievers swim, overfeed their dogs too many treats, don't train their animals to obey, and so on.

With humans, it's even more difficult to establish the parameters of what makes a bad parent, though physical cruelty is still easy to recognize, because we are all so different. If you were to ask an average cross-section of teenagers, you would find that most parents are horrible. Those same parents were gods when the children were little.

I can think of a family right now in which it's my considered opinion that the children are not getting an adequate education (they're homeschooled) because the parents continue to micromanage everything their 5 children read, view or listen to. These children are all teenagers, but are all treated like they're about 8 years old. As a result, the children have a very narrow intellectual life, the boys have no self-discipline when their mother isn't present, and the girls actively circumvent their mother. Yet these parents are adults respected in their [very conservative] section of the community, who would have been seen to be good parents, and they are -- of 8 year olds. You gonna take teenagers away from parents like that? And if so, where are you gonna put 'em?