CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19976, 19 June 1928, Page 9

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

SOUTH AFRICAN PENALTY. INFLICTION OF WHIPPINGS. [from our own correspondent.] CAPETOWN, April 20. By an amendment to an existing statute, Parliament has provided that a whipping shall be added to the list of punishments in cases of cruelty to animals, with an automatic safeguard that a sentence of whipping imposed by a magistrate will not bo carried out until the Supreme Court or a Judge of the Supremo Court has confirmed tho sentence. Several visitors to South Africa in recent years have drawn attention to the cruelty to horses in the cities, and some have gone so far as to say that nowhere in tho civilised world aie horses treated worse than by the coloured drivers iu this country.

Under the old Act any person found guilty of cruelty could bo fined £25, or three months' imprisonment, or both, but the mover of the amendment, Major van Zyl, said that experience had shown, more particularly of late, that it was next to impossible to check cruelty with the existing penalties. By imposing the full penalty of three months' imprisonment, the guilty party was not so much punished as his family. The passage of the amendment through the House has been vigorously opposed by the farmers, both on the Government and the Opposition benches, the attitude taken being that there were too many cases where farmers w-ere brought before the magistrate and fined for cruelty to animals by people who knew nothing about it.