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100
User voted Yes.
2 votes
Aug 17, 2016

Yes.

One of the core duties of any government is to protect those who can't protect themselves. Animals certainly qualify.

Moreover, animal abuse is strongly correlative of other kinds of abuse. It's smart criminal justice policy to catch people who are involved in the abuse of animals: they're very rarely going to merely harm non-human animals if their empathy is so stunted.

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67
User voted No.
3 votes
Jul 20, 2015

I do not support strict punishment for animal abuse. Horses, for example, still pull plows, carry heavy loads, and move people around. A certain kind of person (whom I will not call out here) would deem that abuse and would seek to punish strictly. The problem with strict punishment is it becomes a "zero tolerance policy" like in schools and then the law gets perverted into scripture where even simple, harmless, mistakes are punished.

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100
main reply
1 vote,
Jul 20, 2015

As with any Laws they will receive a fair trial in which the level of 'Punishment' would be assessed and administered by qualified legal professionals. If we are assuming one has some level of belief in the system. As such...the purpose of administering punishment to animal abusers should be fully supported given that in Mental Health.studies, people capable of 'severe' animal abuse tend to have psychpathic traits that often.go unidentified for a multitude of reasons i wont go into here, not least the police system being unable to deyect potentially mentally unstable people when attending a reported incident. Second validating point.to my support, is the brutality involved in the animal food and medical experimental industry i.e i have witnessed a 'doctor' repeatedly punch a small dog in the face and kidneys because it kept wiggling and screaming when he injected its eyeballs a cosmetically surfacent acid. by setting strict guidelines and punishment to those trialled and found guilry we are sending the message out to such brutal people, that they can no longer do this behind closed doors as someone may be watching and the risk of getting caught is too high a price i.e the kroatian man whorunning.Romanias dog shelter wjo killed 15000 dogs has been fined 55000 pounds and received 55 years in prison as he was deemed unfit for human society. i would support that punishment holeheartedly.

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100
User voted Yes.
main reply
1 vote,
Aug 17, 2016

No reasonable person would call a well-fed horse pulling a plow animal abuse. By that logic, it's not possible to have strict laws against murder because some individuals view abortion as murder. Certainly strictly punishing dogfighting would not lend itself to any more abuse than any other law.

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-2
2 votes
Jul 20, 2015

It's a mistake to grant other animals rights on par with humans. While it may turn your stomach what happens to animals in some industries, they're still not human, and shouldn't be treated as such. Choosing to not do buisness with industries that are abusive is completely your right, but people need to hold a higher priority of rights from animals.

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100
User voted Yes.
main reply
1 vote,
Aug 17, 2016

How is strictly punishing animal abuse putting the issue on the same level as humans? Murder is typically met with 25 to life or the death penalty. Wouldn't time in a federal prison for deliberately murdering an innocent animal seem to be fairly reasonable in comparison? The way you frame the issue is as if the only times that animals are abused there is a profit motive where someone can choose not to vote with their dollars. That's not true of someone running a dogfighting ring, or kidnapping other peoples' animals to torment them.

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