Essay - Animal Rights - Animal Abuse Animal Rights: Legal and Ethical...

Animal Rights - Animal Abuse

***** RIGHTS: LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES

***** and History:

Throughout history, man has used animals for food, for their strength to accomplish mechanical tasks and for the raw materials for everything from winter clothing to tools and weapons. Man, unfortunately, also ***** a long history of inhumanity to his fellow man, and of cruelty to animals. In much of the rest of the world, cultural attitudes reflect a continuing insensitivity to animals, working them ***** death, and hunting them to extinction for decorative ivory and superstitious uses of their ground up bones, or harvesting one part such as by hauling ***** from the water to slice off ***** fins bef*****e tossing them back into the water to sink to ***** ocean floor and drown.

***** the United States, ***** values first began ***** recognize the moral issue of causing unnecessary pain to animals in ***** middle of the 19th century and the American Society of Prevention ***** Cruelty to *****s (ASPCA) was founded in 1866 when it busied itself with preventing cruelty ***** carriage horses, among other things (Moussaieff- Mason & McCarthy 1995). Nevertheless, animal cruelty legislation still varies widely from state to state, defining cruelty to ***** as a felony in some states but only ***** a misdemeanor or violation in others (HSUS 2007). Aside ***** the inherent insensitivity of perpetrating cruelty on helpless animals, modern criminologists have identified ***** to animals, particularly among youths, as ***** significant predictor of pathological criminality and serial violent offenders (Schmalleger 1997). At the most extreme end of the criminality spectrum, criminal pr*****ilers who ***** interviewed serial killers have ***** concluded that there is a strong link between cruelty to animals and pred*****position to serial murder of hu***** beings (Innes 2007). A large volume of similar evidence suggests that deliberate cruelty to animals is *****sociated with all forms of criminal violence, including the most recent series of school shootings ********** the last decade, since Columbine (HSUS 2007).

The Current State of Criminal Legislation ***** Future Recommendations:

Despite advances in ***** *****, many types of animal cruelty are still permitted by law. Only 43 states currently punish animal ***** as a ***** with, Hawaii being the most recent ***** adopt stricter criminal penalties for animal cruelty in 2007, after the pass*****g of Senate Bill 1665 and House Bill 676 (HSUS 2007). In the seven o*****r states, even the most barbaric torture of ********** is only punishable as a minor crime. Even in the 43 states prosecuting some ***** of animal cruelty as felonies, there are many types ***** treatment to which animals ***** exposed without triggering the effect of penal law. Whereas torturing animals is prohibited by law and defined as criminal behavior in some cases, other ***** of equally torturous actions are completely legal. For example, the laws of many ***** sanction killing so-called "nuisance" animals ***** electrocution or drowning when performed by licensed pest removal companies; in many cases, these same acts ***** def*****ed as cruel when