Urge your Representative to make animal torture a felony!

Animal Abuse: Bill rightly seeks treatment,

not just prison

If someone had caught a young Ted Bundy torturing animals, convicted him of a felony, put him in jail for 18 months and sent him away with the admonition to sin no more, is there any reason to believe he would not have gone on to become one of our nation's most infamous serial killers?    Nope.    But what if the same young Mr. Bundy - or Mr. Dahmer, or Mr. DeSalvo, or any of the other sociopaths claimed by the Humane Society of Utah to have honed their murderous skills on helpless animals before going on to people - had been forced into psychological treatment?    Hope.    That's why Rep. Scott Wyatt's House Bill 61, which would make intentional torturing of animals a felony rather than the misdemeanor it now is, is worthy of support.    The Logan Republican's bill does not seek to answer cruelty with cruelty. Rather, the bill would direct Utah courts to order those convicted of animal cruelty to undergo psychological evaluation and, at the defendant's own expense, treatment of whatever underlying emotional problem causes any human being to derive pleasure from the suffering of other creatures.    The Humane Society's argument that people who torture humans start out by torturing animals has much merit and, while one might argue that the torture of animals is heinous in its own right, should get the attention of the Legislature.    The bill rightly addresses shocking behavior that has all too often been winked at even in some particularly nasty cases, explained away as boys-will-be-boys or dismissed as no more than vandalism, even when, for example, someone kills and mutilates horses or, in a fit of domestic anger, dismembers a child's kitten while she watches.    And if all the bill would do was to make felons of people who would otherwise walk away, our enthusiasm for it would be much reduced. Our prisons are already crowded with people who, too often, don't get the rehabilitation services they need.    Just prison time, with no attention paid to obvious emotional ills, would probably only serve to make the offenders more offensive, and release them into a world where they hated both the animals society was trying to protect and the people who protected them.    But, with its focus on evaluation and therapy, Wyatt's bill offers some chance of actually diverting a nascent murderer before he moves from killing little girls' pets to killing little girls.