Kay Simpson has seen horrors she’ll never forget.

In October last year, for example, the
director of the Pulaski County Humane Society made a visit to a puppy
mill in Lonsdale, responding to numerous complaints about conditions
there. Simpson, other certified animal inspectors and deputies from the
Saline County Sheriff’s Office, found 40 dogs packed into a tiny
12-by-20-foot windowless shed, some crowded into cages stacked on top
of one another. Urine and feces surrounded the dogs, there was little
to no clean water for them to drink and their food was infested with
maggots and other filth.  

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Puppy mills like this one are not
uncommon. After making money off of a few puppies, some breeders get
greedy. They buy more dogs in order to sell more puppies. Before they
realize it, they have more than they can take care of and the dogs end
up living in squalor.

One of the dogs, Timothy, a Shih-Tzu,
was suffering from a festering eye infection caused by the filthy
conditions. Like most of the dogs, he was adopted, but has since lost
both eyes.

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The owner of the puppy mill was charged
with 53 counts of animal cruelty, a misdemeanor offense. Conviction
would be punishable by a maximum fine of $1,000 per count and up to a
year in prison.

Arkansas is one of only four states
that don’t have a felony charge for animal cruelty. Those charged with
misdemeanors, Simpson said, usually don’t get the maximum penalty.
“When you deal with some of the things that we deal with, like
starvation and collars grown into necks, there needs to be a penalty
for treating animals that way, there really does.”

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Under legislation hammered out by a
coalition of animal rescue groups, farmers and other interested parties
and introduced last week, animal cruelty would be a Class D felony with
much stiffer penalties — a maximum fine of $10,000 and up to six years
in jail. Unlike previous bills, fought by the Farm Bureau and other
interests, this one is expected to pass.

In 2002, 62 percent of Arkansans voted
against an initiated act on the November ballot that would have made
severe acts of animal cruelty a felony. During the 2007 General
Assembly, two animal cruelty bills failed. One draft, supported by
state Sen. Sue Madison, the current bill’s lead sponsor, called for a
first-offense felony charge for animal cruelty. The other, favored by
the Farm Bureau, was less stringent and called for a felony charge on
the second offense. 

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This time around, it looks like
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has brokered a deal between the once
warring animal protection and farm factions. Groups on both sides admit
SB77 is not perfect, but it’s something they can live with.

Filed last week, the bill calls for a
felony charge of aggravated animal cruelty on the first offense when
committed against a dog, cat or horse. The bill defines animal cruelty
as: mistreating an animal, killing or injuring an animal that is not
your own, abandonment, starvation, failure to provide adequate shelter,
or dragging an animal behind a vehicle. Other notable changes include
stiffer penalties when abuse is committed in front of a child,
increased penalties for subsequent misdemeanor charges (the fourth
misdemeanor charge would result in a felony) and required psychological
evaluations for offenders. The bill would also outlaw all animal
fighting; only dog fighting is currently illegal. 

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McDaniel expects speedy passage and
little organized opposition. The day it was filed, the bill had 58
co-sponsors, including majority support from the judiciary committees
of both houses. With such a broad coalition —Farm Bureau, the Arkansas
Poultry Federation, the Game and Fish Commission, the Humane Society of
the United States, the Rescue Wranglers, Feline Rescue and Rehome, just
to name a few — now in place, one obvious question is why did it take
so long?

“There’s never been much dissent from
the fundamental principle — but the difference between a lofty goal and
a law is substantial,” McDaniel said in an interview. “In the bills
that have been submitted in the past — all of which had good goals and
purposes to them — the actual language had not been through the vetting
process that we have dedicated to this bill.”

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The AG’s office spent close to a year
on the bill, going through more than 40 drafts and consulting each
interest group every time a major change was made.

“We’ve tried to be open-minded and
reasonable and if someone made a point that we had not considered, we
would modify it,” McDaniel said. “But every time you change a comma you
have to bring those people together, and they’re distrustful of one
another and I don’t think there’s any secret to that.”

Past distrust came from legitimate
differences between the opposing sides, but some of it seems to have
resulted from a lack of communication between the interested parties.

Simpson said McDaniel has done a good job of bringing groups together.

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“I haven’t been really trusting in the
past because it was like you had the animal people over here and the
farmers over there and the ranchers over there and we all had a wall
between us,” she said. “In the past, I’ve had people walk up to me and
say, ‘We’ll give you this if you give us that.’ That’s not how it
should be. It should be, ‘What can we do to reach an agreement?’ ”

McDaniel said he and his staff realized early on that finding consensus would be difficult.  

“It’s the kind of thing that you would
never get done in a committee setting, in a short legislative session,
or in a high pressure environment. It was the kind of thing that was
going to have to take hours on the phone over the course of weeks and
months,” he said.

Farmers’ main interest was to make sure normal agricultural practices were clearly defined and exempted from punishment.

Earl Pepper, the state equine
commissioner for the Farm Bureau, was included in discussions regarding
the bill’s wording and said this time there was more give and take.
“Farm Bureau has gotten a bit of a black eye on this in the past, and I
think that goes back to the misconceptions and the distrust,” Pepper
said. “I really don’t think anyone at Farm Bureau is for being
cruel to an animal, but there were some points there that needed to be
clarified and I think this piece of legislation does it.”

Pepper said that a good bill would
clearly define and exempt practices like branding cattle or putting
down an animal, which SB77 does.

He also brought up another hot-button
issue that has helped to kill the bill in the past: the fear of
national groups like PETA descending on the state to prosecute
farmers. 

Madison said those fears were probably a little misplaced.

“I think the big fear of the Farm
Bureau has been that this is a nose-under-the-tent kind of thing,” she
said. “They thought if this thing is passed then pretty soon we won’t
be able to butcher a cow any more. We’ll have to give up eating steaks,
or the PETA people will all land in Arkansas. There has been no PETA
involvement in this issue ever, when I’ve worked on it. I think a lot
of people worry about the PETA folks, but there’s nothing in here
that’s going to jeopardize agriculture in Arkansas, in any way.”

Under the current law, animal
protection agencies have the authority to make arrests on misdemeanor
animal cruelty charges. The new bill would place the authority to make
arrests in the hands of law enforcement officials only. Simpson said
that has always been a sticking point for opponents of the bill, but
that the power to make arrests is not something the animal groups have
ever really needed.

“When this is said and done, the same people are going to be working the abuse cases that have always worked them,” she said.

At the press conference to announce the
filing of the bill, Madison stated emphatically, “These atrocities have
to stop!” She said animal abuse should be “brought into the same arena”
as domestic violence, where it is considered to be a crime,
investigated like a crime, and punished like a crime.

“I don’t want to see any more dogs
skinned alive in this state,” she said, referring to an incident in
2007 in which a Benton woman found her dog skinned. The animal had to
be euthanized. “And I hope that people understand that if you go around
stomping puppies and poking them with cattle prods, then you’re looking
at jail time. If you chain a dog to a tree in the woods and leave them,
you could be looking at a prison sentence, fines and a felony record. I
think this is going to be a big deterrent.”

And that’s the big question. Will it actually be a deterrent? McDaniel said yes.

“I think that the 46 states that
currently have felony animal cruelty laws and have kept up with their
enforcement and their arrests have seen that it’s been an important
tool. That’s the reason additional states have sought to follow their
lead because — as with any crime — enforcement is its own deterrent,”
McDaniel said.

As an animal cruelty investigator, Simpson thinks that prosecutors have been waiting for tougher penalties to enforce.

“I think law enforcement is going to
look at this like, hey, this has teeth now. They’re not just going to
let people go for this kind of stuff and that’s going to make a huge
difference,” she said.

McDaniel said he would dedicate
$250,000 from his Education and Enforcement fund to help educate law
enforcement officers on how to identify animal cruelty.

For now, all the interest groups seem
to be appeased.  McDaniel announced the legislation at a press
conference last week attended by a diverse group — farmers,
legislators, animal protection groups and representatives from Game and
Fish, the Pulaski County Humane Society, and Farm Bureau. Assuming the
bill makes it through the Senate, House Judiciary Committee chair Steve
Harrelson said he doesn’t foresee any major obstacles in getting the
bill passed.

Some of the parties who worked on the
bill, though they can live with it, see room for improvement. Simpson,
for example, said aggravated assault against any animal should be a
felony, but the bill is a good starting place.

Timothy the Shih-Tzu was lucky. Even
though both of his eyes had to be removed, owner Debra Wood said he
gets around just fine. “It really amazes me how well he’s adapted,” she
said. “I tell people all the time, it’s not challenging to be an owner
of a puppy mill dog, but it is challenging to understand how our
society lets these so-called human beings get away with treating
innocent animals this way. Timothy wasn’t born this way; someone did
this to him. There’s just no excuse.”   

 

Videos and extended interviews at www.arktimes.com.

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