Animal Cruelty Laws

It seems every time I pick up a paper, turn on TV, go on the internet there it is again a horror story about animal cruelty, man shoot’s and stabs and ultimatly slaughters a hundred Husky’s, man beats ex police dog to death, 6 men duct-tape a foxes jaws shut and make sport of kicking him to death, 8 men fired from dairy farm in Chilliwack for beating probably natures most docile creature cows with chains and boards, or how about because of a total failure of our government and the existing animal cruelty laws to provide even minimal safety in a public dog park and then government uses this personal failure as an excuse for closing down an off leash dog park, all because of Canada's laws inability to catch and prosecute a serial dog poisoner that places poisons, glass, tacks, fishhooks around park in an attempt to maim and kill dogs and this outrage goes on continuously unabated for over a whole year. 

Probably when most people see these atrocitys they think what the hell is wrong with these people and secondly they think why doesn’t someone do something about it. You might well blame the police or the SPCA or if they are by chance caught Judges, but actually none of these people can do a whole lot about this situation because Judges don’t make laws they just enforce the laws that politicians make and the fact is animal cruelty laws are a misdemeanour and that in itself pretty well insures any penalty will be minimal to non-existent, we are talking 6 months in jail and $300 dollar fines which rarely ever happens. 

The real problem is that these laws were brought enacted in 1892 and were never intended to be laws to prevent cruelty to animals that was a different time when you could be shooting bears, wolves, wild dogs in your back yard they were laws to protect commercially viable species such as cattle, horses and you would likely be hanged if you stole or killed someone else’s livestock, they would have probably thought you were crazy if you actually thought people should protect dogs for instance, they were animals that lived outside and killed rat’s and guarded the livestock for their keep, they weren’t seen as family pets as now, anyway this is only a part of the problem.  

Any law no matter how good or up to date a law is it is open to interpretation and more importantly affected by past precedents, no law says "if this crime happens this shall happen", it says or this, or this, etc etc depending on past precedents, and in this case you have 122 years of past precedents, particularly when that law didn’t even have the same intent as what we want it to mean in this day and age. 

In other words these animal cruelty laws are nothing more than unenforceable misdemeanours at best and possibly the worst assembly of words to ever sully a Canadian law book at worst, at least looking at it 122 years after the fact. Over the years they have tried to tweak these laws but have only managed to make them even more bizarre, here’s a beauty the criminal code penalty for uttering a threat to kill poison, or injure an animal or bird comes with maximum imprisonment of 24 months as opposed to 6 months for actually killing the animal.

The government has to first extinguish this archaic relic from the past and all it’s precedents along with the many loopholes that guarantee any lawyer could ensure no one is ever convicted under this law, and come up with a new humane law more in tune with the realties of today’s society and it’s attitudes about animals and in particular the humaine treatment of animals, and this new modern law shall make animal cruelty a felony that gives the police the power to apprehend these monsters and gives judges the tools to punish and fine the perpetrators of these atrocity's appropriately putting the worst offenders behind bars or mental institutions whatever the case may be.