Page 1021 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 2 May 2006
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and, indeed, even fatal to an animal, it is not always intended. Often we have to take into account the impact of the circumstances of the person involved and thus culpability is of a different kind to deliberately inflicted cruelty. Nonetheless, this bill significantly increases the maximum penalties for cruelty under the Animal Welfare Act. I support the intent of the bill.
Agencies such as the RSPCA, as well as members of the community, are sometimes very frustrated by the low level of fines imposed upon perpetrators of cruelty against animals and believe that increasing maximum penalties for animal cruelty will send a clear message to both magistrates and the public that the community takes animal cruelty very seriously. We know that animal cruelty is an issue in our otherwise well-educated and pretty well-behaved community because the RSPCA in the ACT receives more than 850 calls each year regarding animal cruelty. The RSPCA spends about $117,000 annually undertaking the work of following up calls and it receives government support of only $76,000. So I would ask that the dollars that follow this legislation go to the agencies that do the work.
The Greens are committed to improving the conditions for both domestic animals and farm animals. It is simply not acceptable to abuse, harm or neglect animals. The ACT Greens believe that all sentient beings should be treated with compassion and respect. We are opposed to animal cruelty of any form, including intensive farming methods and the use of animals in experimentation and entertainment as well as wilful neglect and deliberate acts of cruelty. To quote Animal Liberation ACT:
Absurdly low penalties are merely the problem at the tail end of a very long series of impediments to adequate legislative protection for animals.
By far the majority of acts of animal abuse are either not detected and/or not prosecuted. Unfortunately, those 850 calls to the RSPCA are just the tip of the iceberg.
The capacity of animal welfare agencies to investigate suspected cases of abuse, to deal with offenders and to gather sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution is generally inadequate as well as slightly ambiguous. It is also very difficult to prosecute a cruelty case because of a swag of loopholes and defences in the legislation, including section 20 that provides defences for commercial cruelty, allowing battery hen farmers to breach cruelty provisions every week. The Greens have raised in the Assembly the issue of the treatment of intensively farmed animals and I think that much more could be done to improve the conditions for intensively farmed animals like chickens and pigs.
Consequently, the Greens see this bill as only one step towards a cruelty-free ACT, as there is much more work to be done with the ACT animal industry. I believe, too, that we should be aware that we are all complicit in animal cruelty unless we take steps to ensure that the eggs, meat and milk we consume are not produced by methods of intensive farming that engage in inhumane husbandry and/or slaughtering practices.
As I said last year, I believe that increasing penalties alone in this bill is not enough. It is unlikely that higher penalties will have a strong preventative impact, nor that maximum penalties will be applied in many cases. It is also unlikely that the imposition of a fine or jail term will address the underlying causes of perpetrator behaviour.
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