USA: Nationwide Law Against Animal Cruelty
This new law takes a hard stance against animal abusers with severe prison sentences.
A YouTuber who beats her dog or a squirrel nailed to a tree. Stories of tortured animals keep surfacing. In the USA, this will henceforth be prosecuted as a serious crime — nationwide. President Donald Trump signed the necessary legislation in the night to put a stop to animal cruelty.
Animal Cruelty Is Now a Capital Offense
Anyone in the USA who causes suffering or pain to an animal will from now on face far harsher punishment. The United States House of Representatives passed a long-pending bill to put a definitive end to animal suffering. Animal cruelty has thus been added to the list of serious offenses and classified as a federal felony.
The «Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT)» Act henceforth punishes the crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling, and any other mistreatment of animals. Convicted animal abusers can face up to seven years in prison.
The bill was introduced earlier in the year and is an extension of an already existing law. Back in 2010, Barack Obama had already banned the distribution of videos depicting animal cruelty.
Broad Support in Congress
Republican Vern Buchanan wrote on Twitter: «Torturing innocent animals is despicable and should be punished to the full extent of the law.»
At the White House, Trump emphasized that animals have always played an important role in the country’s history. They deserve to be treated responsibly: «We should value them and take care of them.»
While animal cruelty has already been outlawed in all 50 US states, a comprehensive, uniform law applicable across the entire United States did not previously exist. That, however, is now changing.
More on the subject of recreational hunting: In the dossier Poaching and hunting crime in Switzerland we document cases, legal questions and recurring patterns. The scientific evidence is presented in the overview Studies on the Effects of Recreational Hunting.
The position of IG Wild beim Wild: IG Wild beim Wild rejects recreational hunting. Our model is the canton of Geneva, which has managed without recreational hunting since 1974: without hunting seasons, without hunting dogs, without driven hunts, without high seats, without the animal cruelty and crime that go hand in hand with hunting season elsewhere. What has worked there for over fifty years disproves every position paper by JagdSchweiz. An association that bases its policy on claims it refutes in its own documents is not a professional organisation, but a factory for misinformation.
