Legal Daily： Animal cruelty, the law will not sit idly by.

On September 25th, official website, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, published the Reply to the Proposal No.5074 of the Second Session of the 13th National People’s Congress (hereinafter referred to as the Reply), which responded to the proposal of Xia Wu Zhuo Ma, a representative of the National People’s Congress, to enact a law prohibiting cruelty to animals. The "Reply" said that it is difficult to effectively crack down on cruelty to animals and other behaviors that are generally opposed by the public because of the lack of relevant legislative provisions. It is indeed necessary to improve legislation.

Legislation to prohibit cruelty to animals is still a relatively frontier topic in China’s current legislative work and has not been included in the recent legislative plan. But this does not mean that there are no relevant laws and regulations in China.

China’s animal husbandry law stipulates specific issues such as feeding, environment, setting, epidemic prevention, quarantine and transportation of livestock and poultry breeding, and clearly puts forward that "developing high-quality, efficient, ecological and safe animal husbandry"; The Law on the Protection of Wild Animals also states that "the state implements the principle of giving priority to the protection of wild animals, standardizing their utilization and strictly supervising them, encourages scientific research on wild animals, cultivates citizens’ awareness of protecting wild animals and promotes the harmonious development between man and nature". In the controversial field of animal experiments, China also has a special Regulation on the Management of Experimental Animals to ensure that the management of experimental animals follows unified planning and reasonable division of labor, and is transferred to the second edition.

Continued from the first edition is conducive to promoting the scientific research and application of experimental animals.

In 2010, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued the Opinions on Further Strengthening the Management of Zoos, requiring zoos to make clear regulations on animal feed quality, cage conditions, heatstroke prevention and cold protection facilities, medical treatment, and the disposal of dead animals’ carcasses, and at the same time requiring no animal performances to avoid animals being disturbed and stimulated.

In practice, there are cases in which the cruelty to animals has a serious social impact, and legal responsibility is also investigated according to the relevant laws of our country. In 2002, Liu, a student from Tsinghua University, threw a bear with sulfuric acid at the Beijing Zoo, which aroused strong social repercussions. In April 2003, the People’s Court of Xicheng District, Beijing first sentenced Liu to intentional damage to property and was exempted from criminal punishment.

For some time, in order to attract the attention of netizens, there are often videos of cruelty to animals in live webcasts, and even a secret industrial chain of online customization and selling of such videos has been formed, which has had an extremely bad impact on society. According to the provisions of China’s cyber security law prohibiting "spreading violent, obscene and pornographic information", the relevant video producers can be investigated for legal responsibility according to law.

To sum up, although we don’t have a law prohibiting cruelty to animals or an animal welfare law, the law will not sit idly by and ignore cruelty to animals, which is a basic requirement of a society ruled by law.

Of course, the legislative suggestions of NPC deputies reflect that with the progress of society and the development of civilization, a clear, systematic and perfect law prohibiting cruelty to animals meets the people’s new requirements and expectations for the rule of law and social fairness and justice. The response of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs released a clear signal-the state supports legislation prohibiting cruelty to animals, and the construction of the rule of law will keep pace with the development of social civilization.

We believe that legislation prohibiting cruelty to animals, which promotes human civilization, will soon become a reality.