By ANGELA DELLI SANTI
May 24, 2007
TRENTON, N.J. — A pit bull terrier puppy named Angel who was starved and fatally beaten by her owners has focused attention on the need to revise New Jersey’s outdated animal cruelty laws.
Assemblyman Jeff Van Drew, D-Cape May, is leading the charge to update and expand the section of law that deals with the abuse and mistreatment of animals, and stiffen penalties for violators.
“This is a complete restructuring of the entire animal cruelty statute,” said Van Drew, who has been working on the legislation for more than two years. “When someone commits a crime against an animal and they go to municipal court, the penalties are not clear to the judge because there is a hodgepodge of laws. This sets new minimum penalties and creates new crimes.”
New Jersey’s animal cruelty laws were established in 1880 and have not kept pace with modern cruelty cases involving dog fighting or using animals to smuggle drugs, said Van Drew, the owner of two dogs.
Van Drew planned to hold a news conference Thursday afternoon to drum up support for his proposal, which has cleared an Assembly committee but has yet to be considered by the full Assembly or the Senate.
“This law is so worthy,” he said. “We’re doing so many different things. It’s actually a template for the country.”
Nancy Perry, vice president of government affairs for the Humane Society of the United States, said New Jersey already has strong animal protection laws on the books, though money and manpower for enforcement are often lacking.
For example, New Jersey is one of 43 states with felony-level penalties for extreme animal abuse, she said.
Among other things, Van Drew’s bill would:
_Strengthen laws against animal fighting, subjecting people who sponsor or profit from dog or cock fights to tougher penalties than those who simply watch; and adding penalties for those who allow children to witness animal violence.
_Sets specific penalties for smuggling drugs inside an animal.
_Establishes standards for tethering dogs to a tree or post: a maximum of 10 hours out of 24, with a harness or buckle-type collar, and on a chain or tether be at least 15 feet long.
_Adds a section on hoarding, in which owners take in a very large number of animals that they can’t care for.
“This bill brings our animal cruelty statutes into the 21st century,” said Sy Goldberg, with the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “This bill reorganizes our patchwork of animal cruelty laws into the criminal code and recognizes our society’s expectation that these crimes be taken seriously.”
NJSPCA, the agency that enforces animal cruelty statutes statewide along with local police, said it investigates about 3,300 cases a year, most phoned in to a tip line.
“Is cruelty up? Is cruelty down? There are peaks and valleys,” said agency spokesman Matt Stanton. “Last summer, we saw a huge spike in hoarding cases, where someone takes in a lot of animals and it gets out of hand. We had 6 or 7 cases in a row.”
Van Drew said Angel’s abusers were never prosecuted.
“The case fell through the cracks,” he said.