With a unanimous vote Monday, members of the Washington State Senate passed Senate Bill 5065, which would tighten state penalties for animal cruelty. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Carrell, R-Lakewood, updates the state’s animal-cruelty statute to bring consistency to penalties for various levels of animal abuse and neglect.
“I’m an animal lover myself, and it sickens me to see the conditions in which some animals are kept,” Carrell said. “You see the news stories about animal mills where dog after dog or cat after cat is removed from a home covered in filth, emaciated and on the verge of death. My bill is another step closer to preventing those types of situations from developing in the first place.”
Carrell said his bill would require that any person who owns an animal is providing the necessary food, water and shelter to sustain a healthy life for the animal. While there was some initial resistance from agriculture groups, Carrell said he’s worked the specifics of the bill to alleviate those concerns.
“This is a bill about pets. It is not about farm animals. This bill is meant to protect pets from abuse, neglect and abandonment,” Carrell said. “Current law already contains provisions that describe conditions where those three criteria are not being met. My bill further clarifies that law by defining the criteria themselves.”
Carrell added that his bill would also penalize the owner of a home if someone in that household owns an abused or neglected pet regardless of the homeowner’s awareness of the animal’s substandard living condition. SB 5065 will now be considered by the House of Representatives.
Joe Boyle says
Mike Carroll,
I certainly support your idea of not abusing pets. Thank you for offering improvements to our current law. But what ever do you mean by your last paragraph in the article above?
I could understand establishing a “duty to report”. If the owner of a home has knowledge, they should be required to report the animal cruelty to the authorities. If the home owner had knowledge and failed to report, they could then be guilty by complicity.
Your article states the home owner can be punished even if they had no knowledge.
Are you going to penalize the owner of a rental home should the renter be abusing a pet? Are you going to penalize a member of our U.S. Military who is out of country while someone living in a home, he or she owns, is abusing a pet? What about the home owner who lives in Delaware being punished for something that happens in a home they inherited from their departed parents in Washington State? That sounds unfair and Draconian to me.
What is next? How about if someone commits a homicide inside a home they own, we make the homeowner guilty of murder?
Mr. Carroll, if you insist on going down this road, how about we make Senators responsible for crimes in their district?
I realize that my “How abouts” sound goofy, but please realize that your idea of making a homeowner responsible for something he or she knows nothing about is goofy too.
Please tell me it is not so.
Mr. Carroll, you have some good ideas, but you should recruit someone who has a large component of common sense to review the structure of your solutions in order to avoid having your solutions create new problems.
Joseph Boyle