I.
Although the statutes exclude wildlife; feral animals are excluded from the definition of wildlife and therefore any animal that was once tame, but has become wild falls within the definition of "animal" under the proposed statutes.

A.
23-13-2. Definitions (48) "Wildlife" means: . . .
(c) vertebrate animals living in nature, except feral animals.

B.
Feral animals could include cats, dogs, pigs, lizards, turtles, gerbils, pet rats, you name it.

C.
If a person injures or kills any of such creatures that are not abandoned on his property, he is guilty of animal cruelty. If the killing is alleged to have been in an extremely cruel manner (shoot to kill, but wound the animal and it is shown to have suffered for hours before you were able to find and kill it?), you could be charged with a felony.

D.
If he wounds the animal and it crawls away and some bleeding heart finds it with it’s leg or wing blown off, they’re going to insist that the hunter be prosecuted for torture.

E.
Under such circumstances, a fairly common situation, especially in Utah’s "outback" becomes a life-ruining felony to people who would never dream that keeping the population of such animals down by shooting them could ever be construed as animal torture. I suspect what was supposed to keep city dwellers from cooking their kittens in a microwave alive, will be used against rural and suburban folks simply trying to keep the population of animal pests at a minimum. People who simply want to protect their yards, gardens and their peace and quiet from annoying pests owned by those who don’t control their animals (it’s 10pm, do you know where your tom cat is?) will probably end up being charged with felonies for things like shooting an annoying tom cat with a BB gun to teach it from coming into their yards at 3am.

1.
I had a case out of Sandy not so long ago where a man who had called animal control on his neighbor’s dog a number of times but they seldom responded. Sandy had a leash law, but were not enforcing it. This guy shot a blowgun dart at the dog hoping to prick him and teach him to stay out of his yard (something akin to the dog brushing up against a rose bush). He missed the dog, but someone saw him shoot the blow gun and he was charged with animal cruelty.

2.
I represented a man who shot a rottweiler which had broken through his fence and was attacking a child with a puppy in her arms (a puppy that had been purchased to replace the little dog the rottweiler had killed in my client’s yard a week earlier), and he was charged with animal cruelty. The case was ultimately dismissed at pretrial, but only after the man had paid several thousand dollars in attorney fees. If the charge had been a felony, he would have likely spent well over ten thousand dollars on defense costs.

II.
Legal fees go up drastically when people are arrested or charged w/ a felony.

III.
Innocent people will be forced to plead to a serious misdemeanor even if they are not guilty, to avoid the risk of being convicted of a felony by a few animal-rights wackos who may dominate a jury.

A.
Let’s suppose you have a rabies outbreak. People in your neighborhood don’t keep their dogs and cats penned up and they keep coming into your yard where your children are playing. Animal control fails to respond in a timely fashion thus exposing your kids to the possibility of being bitten by animals who may have contracted rabies but are not yet showing signs of the disease. You shoot to kill in your own yard. Bullet never leaves your property. You accidentally hit the cat, dog, python, whatever in the eye and are charged with animal torture. My experience has been that police and prosecutors will charge a citizen with the highest crime available hoping to force them into a plea bargain. Anyone charged with a felony is going to have to plead guilty of a misdemeanor rather than run the risk of being convicted of a felony by people like those who protest in front of the fur shop every month down town. Some of these people would convict a deer hunter of a felony for simply harvesting meat if given the opportunity. When an 11 year old boy from the south shot a huge feral pig on commercial hunting property and posted it on the internet, this 11 year old started getting death threats and death wishes from people so caught up with the animal rights movement, that any form of hunting to them was tantamount to murder. You get someone like that on your jury and it doesn’t matter what the law is, they will convict a hunter of the highest charge brought against him or her. I just heard on the radio at 5am this morning that the head of the Humane Society here in Utah is so emotionally charged over this issue, that he would ask legislators to defeat a "second-offense-is-a-felony" because he wants the first offense to be a felony. This simply proves my point about how emotional and inflexible such people are in their zeal to punish anyone who harms any animal for any reason.

The idiots who put a kitten in a microwave will take the plea bargain after being represented by a public defender at taxpayer’s expense. I suspect many of the types of people that commit these heinous crimes already have felony records and really have nothing to lose by pleading to a misdemeanor. On the other hand, otherwise responsible property owners protecting their children, their animals and their property rights will be overcharged by police and prosecutors and will pay dearly to defend themselves and their civil rights (many of which are lost after a felony conviction) against emotionally trumped up charges of animal torture. As a criminal defense attorney I foresee this kind of injustice if the animal torture bill is passed.

Date:

From:

To:

Dear                   :

As a constituent of yours and a gun owner, I encourage you to vote against SB 1001 and SB 1002, the "animal torture" bills. These bills would make the broadly-defined crime of "animal torture" a felony, and any felony conviction permanently strips an individual of his Second-Amendment right to possess firearms. Although these bill are well-intentioned, careful reading of the text indicates that "animal torture" is defined in such a way that it could easily be interpreted include a wide range of possible acts that a decent citizen might commit, such as shooting a troublesome animal and inadvertently wounding it instead of killing it. We don't need any more statutes on the books that could be used to permanently prohibit gun ownership.

Please get back to me as soon as possible and tell me how you voted on these bills.

Thanks for taking time to consider my request.