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Cruelty to animals

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A man in Shanghai who is asking for money and carrying a monkey that is missing a limb.

Cruelty to animals refers to treatment or standards of care that cause unwarranted or unnecessary suffering or harm to animals. Standards of both animal cruelty legislation, and enforcement, may vary between different places from non-existent through to comprehensive, and the acts and conditions which are deemed "cruel" also vary. Opinions are divided whether practices such as factory farming, fur farming and animal testing of medical procedures and consumer products pose a major moral issue.

Cases in which cruelty to animals is due to a deliberate wish to be cruel (as opposed to neglect), are known as zoosadism, and have been repeatedly linked via research with abuse and cruelty to people (including the more sensationalist examples of torture and killing). In such extreme cases cruelty to animals may also have occurred, as a "rehearsal" or as an aspect of development. However this should be viewed in perspective; not all cruelty is sadism, nor are all persons who are cruel to animals necessarily going to be abusive towards people.


Laws against animal cruelty

Many jurisdictions around the world have enacted statutes which forbid cruelty to some animals; for example, see Cruelty to Animals Acts in the United States. These statutes provide minimum requirements for care and treatment of animals, but do not require optimal treatment or address issues of confinement, lack of environmental enrichments, or stress. They require that animals be provided shelter, food, water and medical treatment and that animals not be tortured, or killed in an inhumane manner. Some practices, even if controversial (such as treatment of rodeo and circus animals or medical research or animals deemed pests), are usually exempted from the enforcement of laws against cruelty.

In a few jurisdictions, notably Massachusetts and New York, agents of humane societies and associations may be appointed as special officers to enforce statutes outlawing animal cruelty, see the Massachusetts statute and the New York statute. Brute Force: Animal Police and the Challenge of Cruelty by Arnold Arluke is an ethnographic study of these special humane law enforcement officers.

In 2004, a Florida legislator proposed a ban on "cruelty to bovines", stating: "A person who, for the purpose of practice, entertainment, or sport, intentionally fells, trips, or otherwise causes a cow to fall or lose its balance by means of roping, lassoing, dragging, or otherwise touching the tail of the cow commits a misdemeanor of the first degree."

It is to be noted, however, that in the USA ear cropping, tail docking, the Geier Hitch, rodeo sports and other acts perceived as cruelty in many other countries are in fact condoned. Penalties for cruelty are minimal, if pursued.

In Australia, many states have enacted legislation outlawing cruelty to animals. Whilst police maintain an overall jurisdiction in prosecution of criminal matters, in many states officers of the RSPCA and other animal welfare charities are accorded authority to investigate and prosecute animal cruelty offences.

Most jurisdictions simply depend on law enforcement officers who may not be knowledgeable in the area or assign it a high priority. Spectacular stories about grave atrocities and animal hoarders are mainstays of local TV news reporting, but most offences concern lack of adequate shelter or food and similar mundane deficiencies in animal care.

In the United Kingdom, cruelty to animals is a criminal offence and one may be fined or jailed for it for up to five years. One notable case occurred when a group of students placed a hedgehog in a microwave in the late 1990s. Bestiality is also a criminal offense. One may also be prosecuted for running over an animal. The RSPCA, founded in 1824 as the SPCA, was the first animal welfare society in the world.

In Mexico, animal cruelty laws are slowly being implemented. The Law of Animal Protection of the Federal District is wide-ranging, based on banning 'unnecessary suffering'. The law prohibits conducts from dissection for students in high school or earlier years, to negligence of the owner in providing medical attention to an animal that needs it. Similar laws now exist in most states. However, this is blatantly disregarded by much of the public and authorities; animal protection legislation is gaining relevance very slowly.

Cruelty to animals in film making

There is a case of cruelty to animals in the South Korean film The Isle, according to its director Kim Ki-Duk. In the film, a real frog is skinned alive while fishes are mutilated.

Several animals were killed for the camera in the controversial Italian film Cannibal Holocaust. The images in the film include the slow and graphic beheading and ripping apart of a turtle, a monkey being beheaded and its brains being consumed by natives and a spider being chopped apart. In fact, Cannibal Holocaust was only one film in a collective of similarly themed movies (cannibal films) that featured unstaged animal cruelty. Their influences were rooted in the films of Mondo filmmakers, which sometimes contained similar content.

More recently, the video sharing site Youtube has been criticized for hosting thousands of videos of real life animal cruelty, especially the feeding of one animal to another for the purposes of entertainment and spectacle. In spite of these videos being flagged as inappropriate by many users, Youtube has generally failed to take the same policing actions to remove them that they have with videos containing copyright infringement or sexual content.

Cruelty to animals in the military and war

Spc. Philip Chrystal describes how his squad leader shoots a dog in Iraq

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. He shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the heck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Freaking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....

PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk wrote to then President of the Palestinian National Authority Yasser Arafat after learning that a donkey, laden with explosives, was intentionally blown up on January 26, 2003 in Jerusalem. Newkirk wrote that “Animals claim no nation. They are in perpetual involuntary servitude to all humankind, and although they pose no threat and own no weapons, human beings always win in the undeclared war against them." Newkirk asked Arafat to leave animals out of the conflict.

We don't have to look far to see the abuse of horses, just take a look at http://www.royalcourtofaffairs.com you will see the horses just left to die.

Animal abuse in the circus

The use of animals in the circus has been a matter for controversy recently, as animal welfare groups have documented instances of animal cruelty, used in the training of performing animals e.g. video evidence filmed by Animal Defenders International and by PETA. The Humane Society of the United States has documented multiple cases of abuse and neglect . Some animals go berserk, as in the case of Tyke, an elephant with Circus International in Honolulu, Hawaii who killed her trainer then ran loose outside until she was shot and killed with almost 100 bullets video. The Humane Society of the United States and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals present their case here and here as to why the use of animals, especially wild animals, ought to be disallowed in circuses. Animal trainers, however, deny that such abuse is commonplace .

Sweden, Austria, Costa Rica, India, Finland, and Singapore have restricted the use of animals in entertainment. The UK and Scottish Parliaments have committed to ban certain wild animals in travelling circuses. Approximately 200 local authorities in the UK have banned all animal acts on council land. Animal acts are still very popular in former Soviet Union and throughout much of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. In the United States animal welfare standards are overseen by the United States Department of Agriculture under provisions of the Animal Welfare Act, however, says the HSUS, "while standards for handling, care, treatment, and transport are written into the federal Animal Welfare Act (administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture), those standards are minimal and poorly enforced. Persistent violators are rarely prosecuted" . One can view or request the USDA inspection reports for conditions of animals at various circuses here. Efforts to ban circus animals in cities like Denver, Colorado have been rejected by voters. . Activists saw the defeat as evidence that "big business won, wild animals lost" .

In response to a growing unease from the public about the use of animals in entertainment the formation of animal free circuses have begun cropping up around the globe .

Footnotes

  1. Emery, David. "Florida to Consider Ban on Cow Tipping". About.com. Retrieved 2007-06-07.
  2. Andy McKeague, An Interview with Kim Ki-Duk and Suh Jung on The Isle at monstersandcritics.com, May 11, 2005, retrieved March 11, 2006.
  3. "Pointless Cannibal Holocaust Sequel in the Works". Fangoria. Retrieved 2007-01-13.
  4. Times online, August 19, 2007, retrieved August 25, 2007.
  5. Practical Fishkeeping, May 17, 2007, retrieved August 25, 2007.
  6. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/hedges/2
  7. http://www.peta.org/feat/arafat/

See also

Organizations opposing cruelty to animals

Relevant principal lines of conduct

Well-known principal lines of conduct and feeding patterns with essential cruelty-to-animals eliminating aspects are:

Further reading

  • Arnold Arluke, Brute Force: Animal Police and the Challenge of Cruelty, Purdue University Press (August 15, 2004), hardcover, 175 pages, ISBN 1-55753-350-4. An ethnographic study of humane law enforcement officers.
  • Forensic Nursing: Four-legged Forensics: What Forensic Nurses Need to Know and Do About Animal Cruelty online version
  • Lea, Suzanne Goodney (2007). Delinquency and Animal Cruelty: Myths and Realities about Social Pathology, hardcover, 168 pages, ISBN 978-1-59332- 197-0. Lea challenges the assertion made by animal rights activists that animal cruelty enacted during childhood is a precursor to human-directed violence. The activists argue that our most violent criminals started off their bloody sprees with animal torture. Many parents, teachers, school administrators, and policy makers have thus accepted this claim on face value. In contrast, Lea finds that, in fact, many American youngsters-- and boys, especially-- engage in acts of animal cruelty but that few of these children go on to enact human-directed violence.
  • Munro H. (The battered pet (1999) In F. Ascione & P. Arkow (Eds.) Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 199-208.

External links

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