They Have Rights Too

Leonardo da Vinci once predicted that a day would come when men would regard the killing of animals as they now regard the killing of their own kind. Mahatma Gandhi went further, insisting that the moral standing of a nation could be read in how it treats its animals. Judged by either measure, we are failing badly. Across Bangladesh, and indeed across much of the world, cruelty towards animals continues largely unchecked-sometimes filmed, sometimes cheered, almost always unpunished.

A Catalogue of Cruelty
The list grows longer by the season. In Patuakhali, two dogs were tied with rope and beaten to death with wooden clubs after their owner failed to pay compensation in a neighbourhood dispute. In Ishwardi, eight newborn puppies were stuffed into a sack and drowned in a pond. Elsewhere, a cat was burned alive in a cage, another had its eyes gouged out in Dhanmondi, and a third was hanged for catching pigeons-its death filmed and shared online. In Adamdighi, a woman accused a cat of stealing food, beat it to death, and dumped its entrails in a paddy field.

The horrors are not confined to pets. In Rajbari, a horse had bamboo sticks driven into its body until its intestines emerged from its mouth. A live dog was thrown before a crocodile near a shrine in Bagerhat. Ten dogs and a cat were poisoned in a Mohammadpur housing estate on the orders of committee members. A blue cow that wandered across the border in 2021 was chased until it collapsed and died, simply for being unfamiliar. Wild elephants have been electrocuted in traps, a fox killed for the camera, and a leopard strung up as a trophy. Even livestock are not spared-forty-seven goats suffocated inside a bus used to smuggle them between districts.
Behind every episode lies the same grim arithmetic: a creature too weak to resist, and a human being who mistook that weakness for permission.

The Law on Paper and the Law in Practice
Bangladesh is not without legislation. The Wildlife Conservation and Security Act, amended in 2012, prescribes up to one year's imprisonment and a Tk50,000 fine for killing wild animals. The Animal Welfare Act, 2019 replaced the century-old Cruelty to Animals Act and clearly defines cruelty-from overworking and starving animals to abandoning, poisoning, or using them as bait. Penalties range from six months' imprisonment or a Tk10,000 fine to two years and Tk 50,000 for poisoning an animal to death.

Yet the Act is undermined by Section 18, which bars courts from hearing cases unless complaints are filed by the Director General of the Department of Livestock or an authorised veterinary surgeon. Even eyewitnesses who record abuse cannot initiate proceedings; they can only file a general diary and hope authorities act. Most offences are also non-cognisable and bailable, allowing suspects to secure bail while cases drag on, as happened after fourteen puppies were beaten to death in Rampura in 2017. The guard received a six-month sentence years later, but had already disappeared.

The Penal Code offers a stronger alternative. Section 429 allows up to five years' imprisonment for killing or maiming an animal worth at least Tk 50, and police may arrest without a warrant. But the offence remains bailable and is rarely invoked. While countries such as India, Britain and Germany provide stronger legal protection for animals, Bangladesh's framework still leaves victims voiceless twice over: when they suffer, and again when those who witness the abuse cannot bring their abusers before the law.

What Cruelty to Animals Reveals About Us
A darker thread runs beneath all this, one criminology has traced for decades. Studies in Norway found strong links between animal abuse and child abuse within the same households. The FBI has long noted that many serial offenders in the United States had histories of harming animals before people. A 2009 study also found higher rates of violent and sexual offences among slaughterhouse workers than in comparable industries. This is no coincidence. Cruelty inflicted on creatures too weak to fight back does not remain contained; it is rehearsal.

Charles Darwin observed that no unbridgeable gulf separates the mental faculties of humans from those of higher mammals. If so and every dog that flinches from a raised hand or cat that hides after a beating suggests it is then animal suffering is not lesser, only less witnessed. Swami Vivekananda's teaching that whoever loves living beings serves God was never intended as sentiment, but as instruction.

A Different Ending
None of this need continue. Amending Section 18 to let citizens file complaints, making cruelty offences non-bailable and teaching compassion in schools and homes are not radical demands. They are the minimum a society owes creatures that cannot speak for themselves. We do not own the earth's other inhabitants simply because we are stronger. Their pain is no less real nor their fear of death. They, too, have rights and it is long past time our laws and conduct reflected that.