A Significant Step Forward for Animal Welfare Legislation!

My posts often contain my opinions and attitudes about our egregious animal welfare legislation and how desperately I advocate for change. This is HUGE news and a giant step forward for animals everywhere…and especially so in New Zealand. Hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit now:

This article appeared in The Independent (U.K.) on May 17, 2015. Written by Sophie McIntyre:

Headline: Animals are now legally recognized as ‘sentient’ beings in New Zealand

(Sunday, 17 May 2015) – The New Zealand Government has formally recognized animals as ‘sentient’ beings by amending animal welfare legislation.

The Animal Welfare Amendment Bill was passed on Tuesday.

The Act stipulates that it is now necessary to ‘recognize animals as sentient’ and that owners must ‘attend properly to the welfare of those animals’.

“To say that animals are sentient is to state explicitly that they can experience both positive and negative emotions, including pain and distress,” said Chair of the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee, Dr Virginia Williams, according to animalequality.net.

“The explicitness is what is new and marks another step along the animal welfare journey,” she added

In addition, new material has been added to the section of the Act pertaining to animal testing for other research purposes.

The Government now demands that checks be made as to whether there has been ‘assessment of the suitability of using non-sentient or non-living alternatives in the project’ and ‘replacement of animals as subjects with suitable non-sentient or non-living alternatives’.

“Expectations on animal welfare have been rapidly changing. The bill brings legislation in line with our nation’s changing attitude on the status of animals in society,” according to the President of the New Zealand Veterinary Association, Dr Steve Merchant.

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This is so significant. The absence of viewing animals as sentient beings has been a major part of the problem in animal welfare policies. Now maybe we will see considerable strides in how our world interacts with the animals with whom we share this planet.

Questions: How long do you think it will take the rest of the world to incorporate the sentient nature of animals into legislation and policy-making decisions? How do you feel about New Zealand’s recent act (animal welfare amendment bill) and what effect do you think that will have on other countries? Will the U.S. be far behind?

 

 

This is GREAT NEWS: The FBI Now Tracking Animal Cruelty!

It’s about time! I have been voicing my outrage for years at the inadequacies of law enforcement agencies in dealing with animal cruelty and neglect cases. The major announcement this week that the FBI is beginning to track animal cruelty is a HUGE STEP toward the law recognizing the atrocity of acts of cruelty and neglect to our animal brethren as being worthy of serious legal attention and action.

For so long, crimes against animals were dealt with as misdemeanor offenses and viewed as crimes against PROPERTY as opposed to crimes perpetrated on sentient beings who experience real pain and anguish. Slowly over the last several years, states have enacted these crimes into felony status but even so, they often weren’t taken as seriously as they should’ve been and were often relegated down to misdemeanors in plea bargains and the offenders receiving nothing more than slaps on the wrists.

But this may mark the beginning of a much needed shift: now that the FBI is tracking animal cruelty cases and giving the crime its own category in federal crime reports, the trickle effect to state and local law enforcement may mean significant change in how these cases are prosecuted. And it means that more resources will be devoted to the fight against animal cruelty and neglect. Let me say it again: IT’S ABOUT TIME!

Save Shelter Dogs

Here is the article by Wayne Pacelle, President & CEO of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) as reported on The Dodo:

BIG NEWS: FBI to Start Tracking Animal Cruelty Cases by Wayne Pacelle

(September 17, 2014)  Cruelty to animals will get its own category in federal crime reports for the first time. I got that word yesterday from John Thompson, my friend at the National Sheriffs’ Association, who told me that Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comer has signed off on including animal cruelty offenses in the Uniform Crime Report. Local agencies will also track them to report to the FBI.

No longer will extremely violent cases be included in the “other offense” category simply because the victims were animals. Just as the FBI tracks hate crimes and other important categories, we will now have critical data on animal cruelty. The HSUS has been pushing for this change in policy for years, along with our affiliates, the Humane Society Legislative Fund and Doris Day Animal League.

Before this expansion of the FBI’s focus, there was no process for capturing animal cruelty data on the statewide or national level. Capturing such data is especially difficult because animal cruelty laws are enforced by a very large number of local police, sheriffs, and humane society agents and animal control officers.

But now that animal cruelty, including animal neglect, is included in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, there is a real incentive for law enforcement agencies to pay closer attention to such incidents. With accurate data, law enforcement agencies will also be better able to allocate officers and financial resources to handle these cases, track trends and deploy accordingly.

The decision by the FBI is especially good news for The HSUS, because we are on the frontlines of the battle against animal cruelty in so many ways. We are upgrading state and federal laws, and just this year South Dakota became the fiftieth state to enact felony penalties for malicious cruelty, and Congress banned attendance at animal fights. Besides the thousands of cases on which we work with law enforcement agencies every year to rescue animals from animal cruelty and fighting, we also travel across the country to train law enforcement officials on how to investigate these crimes.

So far this year, we have provided training to more than 1,200 officers, representing 300 agencies, and in areas of the country where it is needed most. It is a new training program designed by experts from across the United States (including our own) and we look forward to expanding it in 2015.

I am enormously grateful for the work of the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Department of Justice in recognizing the importance of animal cruelty. This new development, which has been on the radar of the animal protection movement for years, is a practical way of cracking down on cruelty. The decision is also significant in affirming, at the highest levels of our government, that animal cruelty is a vice just like so many other violent crimes. It is the latest tangible gain in our effort to make opposition to animal cruelty a universal value in our society.

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Your thoughts?