Activists: Animals at risk

In 2014, the latest year for which data was available, Kentucky placed last in the nation on the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s U.S. Animal Protection Laws Rankings for the seventh year in a row.

Scott Heiser, a lawyer with ALDF, noted a few statutes involving animals that contributed to the state’s laws being considered the worst. These statutes included KRS 525.135, which counts a first offense for torturing a dog or cat a class A misdemeanor. Such an act is considered a felony in most other states, Heiser said.

Kentucky’s laws are also problematic because of what they don’t cover, Heiser said. For example, the state has no law regarding sexual contact with an animal, he said.

“Most states criminalize the act of bestiality, but Kentucky does not,” he said.

Heiser said he is baffled by the lack of any law that outlaws sexual contact with animals in Kentucky, though he acknowledged that some other states don’t have bestiality laws.

“It seems that would be a pretty nice piece of low-hanging fruit for a legislator in Kentucky,” he said.

The idea that these laws are only good for protecting animals is also a dangerous illusion, Heiser said,

because there is a link between animal abuse and other crimes. People who commit sex acts with animals are likely to be involved with other crimes, such as consuming child pornography, he said.

Connections between mistreatment of animals and mistreatment of people are explored in a paper that Mary Lou Randour, a psychologist and founder of the Section on Human-Animal Interaction, wrote for the American Psychological Association. The document asserts that people who act out violently against animals often act violently toward people as well.

Besides an association between childhood animal abuse and later criminal activity as an adult, the paper identified a connection between domestic violence and pet abuse. In the document, Randour referred to pet abuse as “a significant part of the pattern of family violence.”

Bestiality is the “strongest predictor of increased risk for committing child sexual abuse,” the paper said.

Kentucky’s laws also lead to a lack of adequate enforcement in some parts of the state, according to Shelly Price, treasurer of Speak Up For Horses, a Falmouth-based nonprofit group that, according to its website, aims to “educate the public on the plight caused by an unknowing public, by inadequate horse welfare laws, and by the woeful enforcement of existing laws at the federal, state, and local levels.”

There is no state law in Kentucky requiring animal control officers to have any sort of training, she said. “Good counties will send them out for training, but some don’t,” she said.

Enforcement of animal laws varies

Enforcement and efficiency of animal control varies by county and depends on how serious those responsible for it are, Price said.

“If they fall short because they don’t know what they’re doing, then the animals die,” she said. “It’s not only that we need better laws, it’s that we have no enforcement.”

Though she wouldn’t identify individual counties where she believes this is a problem, Price said many elected officials are apathetic toward the protection of animals, particularly horses. Speak Up For Horses routinely gets calls about horses in her area that are malnourished, adding that these people report the neglect to law enforcement first only to find that their county’s animal control officer won’t act on the problem, she said. “It’s common for a lot of counties to not do anything,” she said.

Letting an animal starve, which falls under KRS 525.130, which regards animal cruelty, is only a misdemeanor for a first offense in Kentucky.

Speak Up For Horses’ efforts to rescue abused and neglected horses are often unsuccessful because “the county doesn’t want to cooperate,” Price said.

“We are the horse capital of the world. The world. And horses are dying in the fields every day,” she said.

Kentucky-based organizations that cater to hunters’ rights have been a consistent source of opposition to animal rights bills, Price said. In 2014 and 2015, nine bills related to animal welfare, which called for things like “adequate shelter” for animals, forfeiture of an animal after a cruelty conviction and prohibiting the possession of four-legged animals for the purposes of fighting, failed to pass in the Kentucky legislature.

Ed Morris, president of the League of Kentucky Sportsmen, said animal welfare organizations are quick to blame them and other hunters’ rights groups when animal welfare bills are defeated in the General Assembly. The group has been an opponent of numerous bills to criminalize owning animals for the purposes of fighting, but not because it is in favor of dogfighting.

“We are very against dogfighting,” Morris said. “We abhor it.”

While KRS 525.130 forbids participating in or watching dogfighting, there is no law prohibiting the training, breeding or owning of dogs for the purposes of fighting. Though the League of Kentucky Sportsmen is against dogfighting, most of the anti-dogfighting bills the legislature has seen recently were sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States, which the League of Kentucky Sportsmen is opposed to working with.

The last anti-dogfighting bill brought to the legislature was sponsored by HSUS and included language that would include any animal attacking another animal under that law’s jurisdiction, Morris said. This wording could potentially end certain types of sport hunting, which helps keep the animal population under control, he said.

“Fortunately, we have a lot of friends in the legislature who see through it too,” he said. “As far as the League of Kentucky Sportsmen is concerned, we will never support anything by HSUS or PETA.”

Despite the absence of a law that criminalizes owning a dog for the purposes of fighting, animal protection laws in Kentucky favor dogs and cats over other animals, Heiser said. KRS 525.135, which bans the torture of a cat or dog, defines torture as “the intentional infliction of or subjection to extreme physical pain or injury, motivated by an intent to increase or prolong the pain of the animal,” and does not extend protection to any other kind of animal.

“There’s most definitely a double standard in how we treat livestock animals and companion animals,” Heiser said.

New legislation sometimes blocked

Groups dedicated to Kentucky’s farming industry have also opposed a host of animal welfare bills in the past, according to Price. For organizations such as the Kentucky Farm Bureau, attempts to block such bills comes from a fear that stronger animal welfare laws will hurt their business, she said.

“It’s like they’re afraid somehow that domestic animal laws will somehow affect them,” she said.

In 2014, the state Senate’s committee on agricultural added a provision that bans all non-official recordings of the goings-on inside agricultural facilities to House Bill 222, which called for “the creation and support of statewide programs related to animal control and care, and for training animal control officers.” Sen. Paul Hornback, R–Shelbyville, chairman of the committee, said the “ag gag” provision was added in a successful attempt to prevent the bill from passing.

The committee does not actually want an “ag gag” law, Hornback said. “It was just a way to kill a bill,” he said.

Hornback, who has been a farmer for most of his life, said he and the rest of the committee are opposed to legislation that would hinder the farm industry.

“They’re not opposed to the welfare of any kind of animal but they’re opposed to bills that go too far,” he said.

Many laws the group has fought against have been vaguely worded, which makes enforcing an extreme interpretation of the bills too easy, Hornback said. As an example, he cited HB 177, which calls for “adequate shelter” be provided to animals and failed to pass in 2015.

“At first glance, they don’t seem like they go too far but they can be interpreted in different ways,” he said. “We have to be very careful as legislators about what the consequences are.”

— Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter at twitter.com/Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.