Australian Public Asks For More Proactive Pet Laws

Public opinion is shifting to wanting a much more proactive approach to animal well-being rather than a reactive approach to animal cruelty.

University of Adelaide specialists asked the Australian public about their perception of the penalties for animal cruelty.

The court of public opinion

Rochelle Morton, a Ph.D. student from the University of Adelaide’s School of Animal and Veterinary Science and research lead, said that they found that most participants favor forbidding offenders from owning animals. Animal abuse is a matter that evokes strong emotional reactions within communities.

Morton says that the nature of reform to animal well-being legislation in Australia has actually frequently been credited to raising alignment with the ‘community’s’ expectations,’ which means that the community has the power to drive legislative change.

However, despite this assertion, there has yet to be publicly available information revealing the nature of these ‘expectations’ or the methodology utilized to figure out the general public’s stance.

According to Morton, based on the previous sociological study, in addition to legal reforms that happened to increase maximum penalties for animal well-being offenses, it is probable that the community wishes for harsher penalties for offenses.

A total of 2,152 individuals from across the country participated in the survey.

Dr. Alexandra Whittaker from the School of Animal and Veterinary Science worked on the research released in the journal Frontiers in Animal Science.

Whittaker says that while they found that 50% of people wished for penalties to increase, there was almost 80% support for increasing prosecution numbers.

In 2009 Australian study discovered that 60% of individuals promoted harsher penalties.

“We have interpreted the survey outcomes to indicate that the general public supports a majority of cases going to court (more enforcement) instead of the court giving larger fines and jail sentences. It proposes that the enforcement element might be more significant than the penalty aspect to the general public,” claims Dr. Whittaker.

Continuous fight against animal cruelty

In 2020– 2021, the RSPCA successfully prosecuted 426 animal cruelty cases in Australia’s courts. Presently penalties for animal cruelty offenses vary across the states, yet all have stipulations for jail terms and fines. Jail terms differ from one year in the Northern Territory to 5 years in WA and Tasmania, and maximum fines for people of $15,700 in the NT and $287,500 in Queensland. Fines for corporations can be over a million dollars depending on the jurisdiction.

” This research implies that there is higher support for stopping animal cruelty via raised enforcement instead of penalizing animal cruelty offenders through harsher sentences,” states Dr. Whittaker. ” This possibly suggests a change in public opinion in the direction of a more proactive approach to animal well-being law enforcement, as opposed to a reactive approach to animal cruelty.”

Read the original article on PHYS.

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