Why does my dog deserve more mercy than my mum?

Thank you so much for signing and sharing this petition. We are about to cross the 50,000 signature threshold.

You may remember the line in the petition: "if that photograph were of an animal in my care, I would be charged with abuse, cruelty and neglect". I wrote that from instinct but I have since looked deeper into the actual law, state by state, to check what they actually say.

It is not just true. It is worse than I thought.

If you are in charge of an animal in Queensland, you owe it a legal duty of care. That duty expressly includes the treatment of disease or injury. Breach it and you face a year in prison.

Breach it in a way that causes prolonged suffering and the maximum becomes up to three years or $345,400.

Under the same Act, you are taken to be cruel to an animal if you kill it in a way that is inhumane, or that causes it not to die quickly, or that causes it to die in unreasonable pain.

Read that again.

Queensland has made it a crime, punishable by three years imprisonment, to cause a death of an animal to be SLOW. Not to cause a death. To cause a death to be prolonged.

In New South Wales, the law goes further still. If an animal is left "so severely injured, so diseased or in such a physical condition that it is cruel to keep it alive," a veterinarian can end that animal's life without the owner's consent. Keeping the animal alive in that state is itself an offence.

Every Australian jurisdiction carries a version of this duty, and the penalties can be significant.

Now take a look at the skeletal frame of Hem. A body consuming itself from the inside out to sustain life. 

Then tell me my my dog would be shown more mercy.

Hem was not neglected. She was cared for. She was loved. She was receiving the best palliative care available. Nobody failed in their duty to her. It was the law that failed her.

If Hem had been a cat or dog, a veterinarian could have ended it in a moment, and the law would have called that humane. If anyone had tried to make her wait it out, the law would have called that cruelty, and prosecuted them for it.

But because she was human, the law forced her to endure a prolonged death. And they forced her family to watch. 

Australian law already recognises a condition in which continuing to sustain a body is the cruelty itself. It has recognised it for decades. It has attached prison sentences to it.

We built an entire body of law on the principle that letting a body die slowly, when it cannot be saved, is cruelty. We just wrote it for every species except our own

Here is where I need you.

Most of the people who will find this unbearable are not yet on this petition. They are the people in your life who would drive an hour to get a suffering animal to an emergency vet at midnight, and who have never had reason to think about what the law does not allow for a person in exactly the same state.

Please share this update, and ask the animal lovers you know one question: how is this suffering permitted for a human being, when we would never allow it for a dog?

Let's put the human back in humane.

With solidarity and much respect,

Angie

Founder, Hem's Law

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