A news story came to my attention a few days ago, and now I no longer have a link. It seems someone in California (Florida?) has a proposed a statewide registry of animal abusers.
This make a whole lot of sense. Animal abuse can indicate a serious anti-social attitude. Further at least in some cases it seems to be a crime often repeated. Having a registry would be helpful to law enforcement and to employers.
On the other hand, some say that sex-crimes registries have been over-extended and mismanaged. Do we really want to have another set of problems like that?
I don’t like registries and would like to narrow them to specifically sex crimes. I believe that once you served your time, you need to get back into society and be productive. Having a "naughty list"coupled with state-sanctioned discrimination impedes that. If I were God-King of America, I’d arm-twist judges to give two sentences. The first sentence would be jail time. The second sentence would be how long your crimes will be available on a public database.
It’s probably a good idea. However, this could be a slippery slope into registrations for every crime. Why not have a registration for car thieves, spousal abusers, assault, burglaries, etc?
I suppose there are records of every crime, but they are not public. (You cannot easily check to see if a job applicant has a murder conviction.) A registry would be more public.
This is a pretty good reason to have such a registry – it’s worked to stigmatize other kinds of abuse, and the conviction that animal suffering is unimportant is a sociopathy that goes unchallenged too often; it should be officially combated.
The New York Times has a story on this today, and I would post a link, but my internet is acting up.
The story claims that twenty years ago only a few states had felony animal-protection laws, now only four do not have such laws. Also the article says states are increasingly charging animal abusers financially for the cost of clean-up and care of their animals.