VIDEO: What’s Next For The Animal Abuse Bill In The 2017 Legislative Session?

GOLDEN TRIANGLE, Miss. (WCBI) – Another issue that will likely be coming before the Legislature this session will be revamping the penalties for animal cruelty in the State.

The bill has been brought up several times before, and one state legislator from south Mississippi is pushing strongly for it, but she’s facing more opposition than support.

We have to warn you, this story contains disturbing video.

The goal of the bill is changing the first offense of aggravated animal cruelty to a felony, instead of a misdemeanor, but many legislators believe changing the current law will open Pandora’s Box.

“We feel like it’s a slippery slope, that if you start with dogs and cats, then it’s going to be horses, it’s going to be cattle, it’s going to be sheep, it’s going to be pigs,” says Representative Gary Chism, District 37, (R).

However, Justice for Animals Campaign Director, Doll Stanley, says the law specifically targets dogs and cats.

“It protects all of these legal uses of animals, so there’s no way possible that the new law could lead into something else.”

Stanley is currently working five aggravated animal cruelty cases in the state, including one with two men trapping a cat in a cage, pouring boiling water all over it, and laughing at how crazy it was acting.

It’s cases like this backing her fight for felony charges.

“These are people that are antisocial. They shouldn’t be walking amongst freely. To give them a misdemeanor offense for such an egregious act of violence against an animal, is not a civilized thing to do.”

Representative Gary Chism believes the bill will have a hard time passing in the agricultural state because farming advocates are against it.

“Even though it deals with cats and dogs, I think they feel like and that legislators feel like, that maybe what we’ve got on the books is already sufficient. If a justice court judge or the city judge would just put them in jail for six months, or charge them a thousand dollar fine.”

Representative Tyrone Ellis, District 38 (D), says not enough precedence exists, and thinks this is why lawmakers are being cautious with the bill.

“First of all, the research is not in terms of what it’s going to do, or what it has done in other states, and usually that’s what we do. We try to track and model some legislation after other states, and apparently in the other states that probably did this and passed the bill, and then it caught some traction to get it done here.”