Editorial: Time to get tough on animal cruelty

OPINION: No Kiwi able to feel empathy is left untouched by the tales of cruelty toward animals that make their way into the news with distressing regularity. During the holiday break there has been the usual run of them – a staffordshire-cross dog doused in solvent in Invercargill, cattle left to starve on farms, a dog, yoked to a 10 kilogram weight, found drowned near Titahi Bay.

The SPCA says the summer months mean a disturbing rise in animal violence. Sadly, animal cruelty happens at other times of the year, too.

Take Lincoln, an elderly ridgeback stolen as dog-fighting bait last year, who fortunately survived. The man who stole him, William Campbell, 25, of Porirua, pleaded guilty to seven charges under the Animal Welfare Act.

How about Wellington couple Floyd and Antoinette McGovern, banned last August from owning a pet for life, after their old tabby was found emaciated, covered in faeces, and with maggots growing in its flesh. Or 28-year-old Naomi Williams, of Naenae, who pleaded guilty to a charge of starving her crossbred puppy, founding stumbling and barely alive in a Lower Hutt street.

Or Dunedin teenager Jeffrey Hurring, who was jailed for 10 months – the longest custodial term for animal cruelty in New Zealand – for brutally killing a jack russell terrier.

The never-ending litany of what human beings do to animals every year in this country makes the average person feel sick. But a group of people delights in the thought – and the act – of torturing animals, sometimes someone else's pet.

If National's Tauranga MP, Simon Bridges, is lucky, such persecutors will face greater jail time in future. When Parliament resumes, he will put into the members' ballot a private member's bill to increase the maximum penalty for wilful ill-treatment of animals from three, to five years' imprisonment.

His rationale is simple. "A tougher penalty," he says, "would ... be in line with increasingly clear research that those who do serious harm to animals are much more likely to perpetrate family, as well as other violence. In addition, the research shows that psychopathic offenders, often as first offending, demonstrate a propensity for cruelty through abuse of animals".

Mr Bridges is right. The FBI in the United States has recognised the connection since the 70s, when it analysed the lives of serial killers.

The late samurai-swordsman and convicted murderer Antonie Dixon, for example, was reportedly cruel to animals in his youth. Columbine High School pupils Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot and killed 12 classmates before killing themselves, reportedly boasted to friends about mutilating animals.

It is to be hoped Mr Bridges has the luck of the Greens in having his bill chosen from the ballot. Or he might be able to persuade ministerial colleagues whose portfolios touch on the subject – such as Corrections Minister Judith Collins or Agriculture Minister David Carter – to sponsor his measure as a Government Bill. This initiative is overdue and such support would give it heft.

- © Fairfax NZ News