Criminalization of Cruelty to Animals (Comparative Study)

Animal cruelty is a known crime in many jurisdictions. However Iranian Criminal Laws are scarce and insufficient and apart from some general rules, there are no documents in this regard. This paper, through reviewing the foundations of criminalization and constituent elements, tries to introduce this crime to legal community of our country and to the centers for the protection of animal rights, while using criminal laws of some western countries especially United States and France. The main question is, firstly what are the foundations for criminalization of animal cruelty? How are the elements of crime affected according to either theory? Second, according to cultural and economic scene of Iran, which theory would be best to adapt in Iran? Criminalization of animal cruelty could be based either on Utilitarianism, which would prevent harms to animals claiming it would prevent harms to human, or based on Moralism, which declares violence against any creature, be it animal or human to be wrong. It seems that first approach would result in minimal criminalization, rather than the second approach which would result it maximal criminalization. Due to the lack of necessary cultural premises in our country, and despite existing Islamic basis regarding animal rights, the minimal model seems more suitable to the Iranian Criminal Laws. In this model, actus reus of the crime would be any violent conduct mainly against animal’s body resulting death or unnecessary pain. The subject of crime is vertebrate animals and the mens rea is intentional harm. In countries who criminalize this crime, it is regarded as misdemeanor in sense of punishment. The research method for this paper follows describing the issue and then analyzing it using the available resources in accordance with laws and doctrines of selected countries.