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According to the laws of most nations, animals are covered under property rights. That means

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Reason I chose: Explain what is animal abuse in depth to help understand what it is exactly

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What is Animal Cruelty? | Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

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The Pennsylvania SPCA enforces the animal cruelty laws of the Commonwealth in 23 counties. Under Pennsylvania law, cruelty to animals includes:

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REason I chose: Gives other sites explains current laws

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The law includes requirements on record keeping and facility maintenance, standards of care and an annual licensing fee. Commercial dog or cat breeders must register with the Board of Animal Health for each facility they own or operate in Minnesota. Licensure is mandatory and a commercial dog or cat breeder must obtain an annual license for each facility in Minnesota.

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REason I chose: Shows the U.S.A

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Reason I chose: Shows an animal that is abuse which just wants help

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Reason I chose: Explains how I feel about this topic

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Reason chosen: Found this interesting

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Reason chosen : shows a dog who was abuse and got help. The dog became more healthy and happy and learned how to trust people again.Dog found on the side of the road.

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Two states have taken steps towards treating animals as individuals, a shift in their legal rights that could have wide repercussions.

Today, more than two thirds of American households own pets. Annually, they spend more than $50 billion on their care, giving their dogs birthday presents and having professional photographs taken . In fact, according to some studies, many Americans grow more concerned when they see a dog in pain than when they see an adult human suffering. It's as though household pets have become part of the family. And now, the law is starting to catch up.

Last year, the Illinois state house passed a law that would force divorce courts not just to divvy pets up between their "parents" in a custody battle, but to think about their well being, too. "It sort of starts treating your animal more like children," says Illinois State Senator Linda Holmes, the legislation's sponsor.

Illinois is only the second state to adopt a law that would consider the well being of animals in custody battles. A year ago, Alaska became the first to amend its divorce statutes so that judges are now required to consider it in their judgments. They can also assign joint custody over an animal. And while these state laws may at first seem limited, animal rights lawyers say that they are a step forward in the recent push to recognize the rights of animals-not as property, as they have historically been seen in the eyes of the law, but as sentient individuals, entitled to certain rights of their own.

"In the last five years or so, it's gone from sort of this very fringe area of the law to very mainstream," said Tony Eliseuson, a senior staff attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Not only could new laws recognizing animals as individuals spread to other states, but they might also provide a precedent for novel interpretations of the law, rippling out into other areas from veterinary malpractice to agricultural and entertainment industries, as activists challenge what they see as inhumane treatment of animals kept in captivity.

The idea that animals might have rights of their own is a relatively new one. For much of the twentieth century, the law considered pets, or companion animals, to be property-akin to a rug or a toaster. Before that, pets had even fewer protections: Someone could steal and kill a pet without facing any penalties. According to an article by Joyce Tischler, the co-founder of the ALDF, in the Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy, it wasn't until the 1970s that the first animal rights cases were tried: In 1973,New York attorney Hank Holzer sought to stop religious ritual slaughter (which is allowed under the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958) and several years later, the abysmal condition of animals in New York City's zoos. He lost both cases, but managed to draw public awareness-becoming, according to Tischler, the first animal rights lawyer in the United States.

Even though pet ownership has spiked in the intervening years (it's increased 30 percent since 1988, when the first surveys were conducted), some activists say the American judicial system is lagging behind. A flurry of recent articles have made this case: The Huffington Post says, " Re-Classifying Dogs as Sentient Beings: It's Time, America, It's Time"; " Dogs are people too," wrote Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics who scanned conducted MRI scans of dogs' brains, in The New York Times; "If Canis lupus familiaris can be shown to have emotions, and a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child, there is a moral imperative to reassess how they are treated under law," writer Susan McDonald argued in The Guardian. Similar arguments have been made for wildlife as well, particularly chimpanzees because of their high intelligence.

The United States wouldn't be the first country to declare animals "sentient." The European Union recognized animals as "sentient beings" in 2009 as an Article in the Treaty of Lisbon. United Kingdom environmental secretary Michael Gove promised to consider amending British law to recognize the EU's article on animal sentience in November, after ministers sparked social media backlash for voting not to include this recognition in the EU Withdrawal Bill. The French National Assembly adopted the same recognition for animals in 2015, although the change was criticized as more symbolic than revolutionary. And the same year, both New Zealand and Quebec officially recognized animals as sentient beings, with New Zealand going so far as to ban the use of animals in cosmetic testing.

The new Illinois state law doesn't go quite as far: It avoids explicitly using the term "sentient." But according to Eliseuson, the law nonetheless has "formally recognized the sentient interests of companion animals and given the power to the court to put the rights and interests of animals ahead of their guardians"-one step closer to recognizing what other countries have acknowledged.

It's easy to imagine activists pushing the law further. There are already inconsistencies that lawyers might leverage in a push to make the law more inclusive of animals. All 50 states have laws on the books to prevent cruelty against animals. Even though animals are still seen as property in many states, if someone murders their cat, they could be liable for a felony. This isn't the case for other kinds of property; you can't be held liable for hurting a toaster.

Some lawyers are already pushing the law to its extremes. Last July, for example, the ALDF asked a federal court to consider whether an animal is an individual in its attempt to get government documents about Tony, a tiger who lived at truck stop in Louisiana and suffered, according to the ALDF's complaint, from "potentially severe health issues." (Tony died three months after the case was filed.) The ALDF's case, whichis still pending before the Northern District of California,hinged on Freedom of Information Act requests, which can, according to federallaw, be expedited in cases that "pose an imminent threat to the life or physical safety of an individual." If animals are considered individuals, maybe they too should be accorded the same privilege, if their lives are in danger, the ADLF argued. To make their case, the lawyers looked not to abstract philosophy or moralism, but rather to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, which not only did not define an individual as human, but even explicitly used a tiger in one of its usage examples: "The markings on tigers are unique to each individual."

The Nonhuman Rights Project, a nonprofit organization, has adopted an even more revolutionary argument: that animals should be entitled to the right to not be unlawfully detained under habeas corpus. It has been filing writs of habeas corpus on behalf on wildlife, such as chimpanzees and elephants, to request that they be moved from captivity to an animal sanctuary. The organization's founder Steve Wise has yet to win a case on this argument, but the argument isn't totally without precedent: A court in Argentina granted a writ of habeas corpus for an orangutan named Sandra in 2014. But it's still a long way off here in the United States. The consequences of giving animals personhood could just be too radical. "We kill millions of animals a day for food," Richard Epstein, a law professor at NYU, told Harvard Magazine. "If they have the right to bodily liberty, it's basically a holocaust." (Epstein told Harvard that he advocates for giving animals protections without giving them rights.)

If any of these suits were to gain traction, perhaps the people most impacted would be veterinarians and kennel owners. Pet owners currently cannot typically collect damages beyond the economic value of their pet ( no more than a few thousand dollars in most cases). If the law changed so that pets were no longer classified as property, vets could find themselves vulnerable to lawsuits demanding hefty damages for, say, loss of companionship or pain and suffering. (That's why organizations like the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Kennel Club have historically opposed efforts to bestow additional rights on animals.) And if animals were given full "personhood" rights, its ripple effect could extend well beyond the pet care industry, into every sector of the economy that works with animals, from agriculture and cosmetics to zoos and parks that hold animals in captivity, like SeaWorld.

"We should not fool ourselves into minimizing the implications of these lawsuits by thinking that they are, in the long run, only about the smartest animals," wrote Richard L. Cupp, an animal law professor at Pepperdine, in 2015 in a legal journal. "How many species get legal personhood based on intelligence is just the start."

Suzanne Monyak is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.

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When the Law Recognizes Animals as People

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Two states have taken steps towards treating animals as individuals, a shift in their legal rights that could have wide repercussions. Today, more than two thirds of American households own pets. Annually, they spend more than $50 billion on their care, giving their dogs birthday presents and having professional photographs taken .

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REason chosen: EXplains more laws for animals.

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In the United States, animal protection laws can be enacted and enforced at every level of government.

Most animal protection legislation happens at the state level. There are also a handful of federal animal protection laws. Additionally, some cities and counties pass ordinances to protect animals.

This is why it's critically important to advocate for better animal protection laws with lawmakers in all government bodies. Each has the power to help.

Federal Animal Protection Laws

There are only a handful of federal animal protection laws:

The Animal Welfare Act: Signed into law in 1966, the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) is the primary federal animal protection law. The AWA mainly involves animals kept at zoos and used in laboratories, as well as animals who are commercially bred and sold like those in puppy mills.

The AWA directs the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture to set minimum standards regarding these animals' "handling, care, treatment, and transportation." Dog fighting and cockfighting are also prohibited under the Animal Welfare Act, so long as the activity in some way crosses state lines.

The AWA itself, as well as its enforcement by the Department of Agriculture, are frequently criticized for allowing inhumane practices to go unchecked.

The "28 Hour Law": This law, enacted in 1873, requires vehicles transporting certain animals for slaughter to stop every 28 hours to allow the animals exercise, food and water. The law does not apply if the vehicle in which animals are being transported contains access to food or water, and there are many other exceptions as well. Birds like chickens and turkeys, which are the most-farmed animals in the United States, are considered exempt by the federal government.

The Humane Slaughter Act, or the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act : This law was first passed in 1958, then amended in 1978. The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires that animals be stunned into unconsciousness before slaughter, to minimize pain.

Though chickens, turkeys and other birds feel pain just like other animals, they are not protected by this law. Enforcement of this law has been found by government inspectors to be "inconsistent."

The Endangered Species Act : Enacted in 1973, the Endangered Species Act protects fish, mammals and birds - as well as plants - listed as threatened or endangered in the United States and beyond. The ESA outlines procedures for federal agencies to follow regarding listed species, as well as criminal and civil penalties for violations. This law is chiefly administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service.

Companion animals:

Companion animals - a category often limited to dogs and cats, but that sometimes includes birds, horses, and other animals as well - usually receive the strongest level of protection under state laws. However, there have been cases where someone has been prosecuted for having committed egregiously cruel acts against wildlife or farmed animals.

This can even extend to marine animals. In 2017, three Florida teenagers were charged with animal cruelty for their torture of a shark.

Each state also has laws governing some aspects of the "hands-on" care of animals. For example, there are laws regulating how long animal shelters must "hold" stray animals before they can be adopted or euthanized. There are also laws about how frequently pets must be vaccinated against rabies. States often also have some regulations concerning commercial breeding of companion animals.

"Hot car laws" criminalize leaving an animal in a vehicle in extreme weather, and some hot car laws allow these animals to be rescued from vehicles in certain circumstances and make the rescuer immune from civil or criminal liability. Anti-tethering laws limiting how long pets can be tied up or chained outside, especially in extreme weather, are also growing in popularity, as are laws allowing pets to be included in domestic violence protective orders.

California is at the forefront of some other statewide animal protection measures. In 2017, California became the first state to pass a statewide "retail pet sale ban." Under this law, retail establishments like pet stores may only sell cats, dogs and rabbits coming from shelters and rescue groups-and not from commercial breeders. Maryland passed its own statewide retail pet sale ban in 2018, becoming the second state with this type of law.

Wildlife:

Each state also has wildlife protection laws, as well as laws regarding the time and manner under which it is sanctioned to kill wildlife through hunting and fishing.

Wild animal performance bans: Some states regulate the use of wild animals in performances. In 2017, Illinois and New York passed the country's first statewide bans on the use of elephants in entertainment. This is generally seen as the beginning of a more widespread trend.

Farmed animals:

While farmed animals are often left out of state animal protection laws, a number of states have adopted measures to limit the use of "intensive confinement" farming practices. Such practices entail confining animals in restraints that are so small the animals often can't fully stand up or move around. Chickens and hens kept in battery cages don't have room to stretch their wings.

Local animal protection laws: Many other companion animal protection measures are enacted and enforced at the local level. For example, hundreds of cities and counties have retail pet sale bans like California's and Maryland's.

Similarly, in states without anti-tethering laws, many cities and counties pass their own such laws. A growing number of cities are passing and enforcing their own wild animal performance bans.

While state and federal laws would offer more protection to more animals, these local laws are very important. They not only protect the animals in that area - but they can also act as a bellwether for more expansive protections to come. It is not infrequent for new animal protection measures to begin at the city or county level, and then as the public increasingly demands it, to be taken up by the state legislators.

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In the United States, animal protection laws can be enacted and enforced at every level of government. Most animal protection legislation happens at the state level.

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People who hurt animals don't stop with animals. There is an established link between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans - regularly referred to as "The Link."

This link makes it critically important that cruelty toward animals be taken seriously by law enforcement, and by society at large. This is for the sake of the animals themselves, and for people who are also at risk.

Ample research backs up the finding that there is a direct link between acts of cruelty to animals and violence toward humans. This includes child abuse, domestic violence, elder abuse and other violent behavior.

Here are just a handful of examples of the research supporting that conclusion:

A landmark 1997 study by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Northeastern University found that animal abusers are in fact five times as likely to also harm other humans.

Another study, published in 2013, found that 43% of those who commit school massacres also committed acts of cruelty to animals - generally against cats and dogs.

Phil Arkow, coordinator of the National Link Coalition - a group focusing on the intersection between violence toward animals and humans - has written often about animal abuse being an indication of domestic violence, or what's called a "predictor crime."

Indeed, a 1983 study notes that animal abuse was found in 88%of homes in which physical child abuse was being investigated.

If a child is cruel to animals, research shows it may be a sign that serious abuse or neglect has been inflicted on the child. Children who witness animal abuse are at greater risk of becoming abusers themselves.

A 2017 study showed that 89% of women who had companion animals during an abusive relationship reported that their animals were threatened, harmed, or killed by their abusive partner.

This finding is in line with other research showing that domestic violence toward pets both correlates with domestic violence toward humans, and is also a tool of domestic abuse - violent members of the household will threaten to hurt or actually hurt a companion animal as a method of control and a form of emotional violence. Indeed, more than half of women in domestic violence shelters report that they delayed their escape out of fear for their animals.

The Law Must Protect Animals and Punish Animal Abusers

Both because animals themselves need protection, and because of the link between cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans, violence against animals must be taken seriously under the law.

There are some ways in which the law is reflecting this seriousness. For example, all 50 states now have felony animal cruelty laws on the books. Nearly two thirds of states allow pets to be included in domestic violence protective orders. These are just among the advances we've seen at the state level in this area.

At the federal level, there is progress, too. As of 2016 the FBI began tracking crimes against animals in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), in the same way it tracks other serious criminal offenses. This tracking will help paint a better picture of who is committing crimes against animals, and where these crimes are taking place - and will thus also help indicate where humans are also at risk.

But we are not yet at the point where cruelty to animals is consistently reported, investigated, prosecuted, or punished in ways that match the seriousness of the crime.

How to Help

The law is only just beginning to catch up with the Americans' widespread view that animals are family members who need robust protection under the law. This is both for the sake of animal victims and for the safety of communities more broadly.

Animal protection laws vary from state to state, and so we face a patchwork of laws across the country. To see how well your state is protecting animals, and where it needs improvement, see the Animal Legal Defense Fund's annual State Rankings Report, ranking the animal protection laws of all 50 states.

Let your lawmakers know that you care about this issue, and that you want to see your state's animal protection laws strengthened, and stronger enforcement of those laws.

Information and Resources

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Animal Cruelty and Domestic Violence - The Link Between Cruelty to Animals and Violence Toward Humans

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People who hurt animals don't stop with animals. There is an established link between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans - regularly referred to as "The Link." This link makes it critically important that cruelty toward animals be taken seriously by law enforcement, and by society at large.

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REason chosen: Video is about state lawmakers want to strengthen animal abuse laws from seeing a dog who is abuse

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State Lawmakers Call to Strengthen Animal Cruelty Laws