Sadly, and quite disturbingly, animal cruelty is a daily occurrence around the developed world, and that's not even accounting for the vast amount of cruelty inherent in factory farming. I decline to report on the many domestic animal cruelty stories I see every day. I figure no one really wants to be barraged on a daily basis with knowledge that animal X was found dead from animal cruelty, or that person Y was arrested for said cruelty. After all, numbing you won't make the problem go away. Suffice it to say, it's a big problem, and it needs solutions that take the issue seriously. With that in mind, we look at this story on a proposed law that would finally make animal cruelty a felony in Utah. While this looks like good news on the surface, it is a bit of a mixed bag.
Utah is one of only eight states where animal cruelty is only a misdemeanor, so it's high time that it become a felony. But, while the penalty for cruelty to companion animals would increase, the law would strengthen exemptions for such "traditional" animal exploitations as hunting, farming, and ranching, despite the inherent cruelty typically involved in their most standard practices, like the slaughter process.
Defending the bill from opponents in the Senate, Rep. Scott Wyatt, R-Logan said ''It's an animal cruelty bill, and they assume that it's an animal rights bill and it's not that." Note the distancing from animal rights in order to give even such a limited bid for compassion any shot at passing.
Ironically, it may be better for animals if this bill doesn't pass, in order that it might not institutionalize cruelty to some animals so that others might be avenged more fully in order to curtail the transfer of violence to humans some day. After all, making animal cruelty a felony is less likely to decrease these sorts of crimes of passion by someone that doesn't come from a paradigm of respecting life in the first place. The abuser will not likely think to himself, "Gee, if I slice open my wife's cat, I could end up with a harsher sentence. I guess I ought to calm down and get some counseling." Sure, a stiffer penalty would feel nice for those who care about animals, but we should bear in mind that the system sees this more as a domestic violence issue than as an animal cruelty issue, despite the Congressman's quote above. To wit:
The link between animal cruelty and domestic violence is becoming increasingly clear. Last April, Maine was the first state to adopt a law including pets in domestic protective orders.It is important to remember that many animal cruelty cases do occur outside of these types of relationships, though, whether wayward teens commit cruelty to ferals or outdoor pets, and so on. Again, this is leaving aside the billions of cases of cruelty committed annually in the world of intensive agriculture.
''It means that the courts are acknowledging that [the abuser] may stop abusing the wife and the children, but he'll still scare everyone to death by abusing the pets in the home,'' said Frank Ascione, a psychology professor at Utah State University.
Then again, we shouldn't be leaving that aside. The point of living an animal-friendly life is, of course, to be friendly to all animals. No one animal deserves special merit over others, simply because of tradition, including ourselves. This bill presents a dichotomy that is rarely discussed publicly, and perhaps ought to be pursued in the editorial pages of The Salt Lake Tribune.
While I do support making animal cruelty a felony, I'd like to see public criticisms regarding the exclusion of wild and farmed animals, which deserve the same consideration as companion animals, for reasons you may want to share with readers, seeing as how pigs and cows are just as feeling as dogs and cats. By codifying cruelty to farmed animals while making cruelty to pets a felony, this bill actually widens a cruel schism in the human heart and mind that ought to be shrinking instead, for own good as well as the animals.
From the editors:
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Labels: animal cruelty, animal law
