Part IV The Abuse of Animals Used in Entertainment
Animal Fighting
Characteristics of Dog Fighting
Prevalence
Nội dung
344 C Lawson bloodlines and past performance, may often be beaten, drowned, shot or strangled to death, sometimes on the night as entertainment for the other participants Prevalence In the USA, dog fighting has been estimated to be an industry worth in excess of half a billion dollars, and involves approximately 40,000 dogmen who can be categorised as professionals (Gibson 2005); up to $500,000 seized at one fight (Lockwood 2012, p 8); and perhaps 2000 fights being held per year7 (Strouse 2009, p 17) Due to no standardised law enforcement data collection across the 50 states, the number of offences (both state and federal), and the range of agencies involved, the tracking of dog fighting cases has been problematic Many have relied upon pet-abuse.com which catalogues press reports of fighting cases This may change as the FBI recategorised animal cruelty and began tracking data from 2016 In the UK, dog fighting is predominantly investigated and prosecuted in England and Wales by the animal welfare charity the RSPCA The police will sometimes investigate alone but they are far more likely to assist with RSPCA investigations, whose own officers possess no power of entry or arrest With only two agencies involved, reporting could be expected to be clearer than the USA The nature of the way in which the UK Government collates its own Crown Prosecution Service and court data suggests that RSPCA prosecutions are not always recorded by the Ministry of Justice For example, Table details the official prosecution and conviction rates for dog fighting, declared by the Government in 2015.8,9 This data does not reveal how many separate instances or cases of dog fighting to which these prosecutions relate It is perhaps symptomatic of one of the problems of recording and tracking criminality in this sphere, that the official data, in Table above, and also the RSPCA’s data, in Table below, does not tally with those reported by Harding and Nurse (2015, pp 49–50) Strouse (2009) cites figures reported by the now-defunct Sporting Dog Journal to which dog fighters submitted fight reports and applied for certificates of championship Note the SDJ had, despite strict conditions, 6,000 subscribers in its heyday The publishers were arrested in 2004 and the SDJ ceased to exist apart from one further edition in 2007 Response in answer to Parliamentary Questions 223989 and 9486 answered on the 23rd March and 16 th September 2015 respectively http://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-ques tion/Commons/2015-09-08/9486