The Animal Protection Act (動物保護法) permits a custodial sentence of no more than one year for causing the death of an animal by abuse. That is more lenient than the punishment allowable in Article 354 of the Criminal Code — no more than two years — for the damage or destruction of “a thing belonging to another.” Compare this with laws in the EU, where the punishment for causing the death of an animal by abuse is a sentence of more than three years.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator and lawyer Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) used an example to show how disproportionate these sanctions are.
Gao pointed out that if a person killed a dog and at the same time damaged the cage in which it was kept, the offender could be given a one-year sentence for killing the dog, and twice that for damaging its cage. The nonsensical nature of this situation was not lost on many, neither the animal rights groups holding candlelight vigils, nor those in the halls of the national congress.
The case at the end of last year involving National Taiwan University student Chen Hao-yang (陳皓揚), who killed a popular street cat named “Big Orange” (大橘子), and the 47 stray dogs that died of dehydration and heat exhaustion in an inadequately air-conditioned van in transit from an animal shelter in Chiayi County, have resulted in calls from the public to increase the severity of allowable punishments as prescribed in Article 25 of the Animal Protection Act.
In April, more than 500,000 people signed a petition to this end, and there were concurrent vigils in five cities in Taiwan, together with coordinated marches in Hong Kong and Macau.
A preliminary hearing at the Legislative Yuan’s Economics Committee of a civil action brought by a cross-party group of 32 legislators was concluded on Friday last week, and within the next week or so it is due to receive its second and third readings.
With this amendment, the jail sentence for killing an animal through abuse would increase to no less than two years. This would mean that the punishment for killing an animal would no longer be more lenient than that for damaging or destroying “a thing belonging to another,” and would be a major step forward for animal rights.
This is by no means a cast-iron guarantee that how the judiciary actually applies the laws would change. In the past, people accused of abusively killing animals have on average been handed sentences of a little more than three months, not even half the allowable sanction.
In addition, since sentences of less than six months can be commuted by paying a fine, only one person was handed a prison sentence, a homeless person unable to come up with the money.
There is also a great range of cases that come in front of judges, including some very serious ones in which the defendant ended up being given a very lenient verdict.
This was what led to a proposal for an amendment to the law to bring the sentence for two different crimes against animals — causing death through abuse, and slaughtering certain animals for sale as food — to a minimum sentence of six months, so that judges would not levy punishments that are too light. However, this was not passed, due to objections from the Ministry of Justice.
The presiding judge in the trial over the death of Big Orange has thrown out prosecutors’ requests for a lenient sentence, and in the future judges should have the option of giving a custodial sentence of as much as two years.
However, the possibility still exists that the accused will get off with a light fine, just as before.
There is nothing to say that the naval recruits charged with abusing and hanging the dog “Little White” (小白) will be handed a sentence any heavier than what they would have been given prior to the act’s amendment, so the label given to the revised clause — the “Little White clause” — by the media is both presumptuous and utterly misleading.
The area in which this amendment represents progress can be found in Article 25, Clause 1. This amendment states that, in serious cases, including the common situation across Taiwan in which animals are deliberately poisoned, or cases in which multiple animals are killed, the allowable jail sentence is to be increased from one to five years.
Should the revised version of the article be applied, we can expect to see offenders guilty of killing animals being handed sentences of more than a year.
Some rather caustic netizens think these are largely populist changes, and that the Animal Protection Act is set to become the most progressive animal protection legislation in East Asia.
However, many Taiwanese still believe that animals are just possessions. It seems clear that the message needs to be communicated more widely, and the law revised accordingly.
Animal protection advocates will continue their mission to expand love for animals beyond companion animals to wild animals, working animals, show animals, and animals used in laboratory testing so that all our fellow travelers on this planet, who contribute to its wonderful diversity, are treated equally.
Pan Han-shen is the Trees Party policy director.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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