JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

This column makes me ill. Here's hoping it makes you ill.

There was a neighborhood dispute in the small town of Hasty in Newton County in northern Arkansas. There was this videotape with images relevant to the dispute. The videotape got played in open court in a trespassing case.

Inadvertently the tape was kept running longer than needed to provide evidence in the case at hand. Suddenly the tape began showing gruesome brutality.

A 41-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy were entering a shed where dogs were kept. They carried an electric cattle prod. The man announced that some dogs were about to get hurt.

He and the boy shocked the dogs with the prod, one in the open mouth and another repeatedly until it bled from the mouth. They entered a neighbor's home and stomped the neck of a small black dog, causing it to howl in pain and terror.

The unsuspecting judge beheld this horror in his own courtroom. He ordered the sheriff's office to take custody of the tape.

It turned out that the sheriff's office had been tipped by the neighbor to such alleged activity months before, but hadn't acted.

This time the sheriff's office arrested the man and the minor child. The man has been charged with one felony. It's for breaking and entering the neighbor's home.

None of that subhuman brutality to helpless dogs amounts to much of a crime in Arkansas, but a mere misdemeanor, thanks to the Farm Bureau and Poultry Federation and politicians not possessed of any prevailing sense of decency or humanity.

You can get mad at the sheriff for not acting assertively on the earlier tip. But the authorities must manage their time and resources. By our state criminal code, the tip didn't concern anything much more serious than driving 35 in a 25.

If the Farm Bureau back home fears that making a felony of torture of animals would impair the very culture and livelihood -- the ability to grow and slaughter livestock or run a stray dog off property -- then that's the constituency the politicians will serve.

Never mind that, time and again, those seeking to create such a felony have written terse and restrictive measures plainly applying not to any established forms of animal husbandry, but only to extremely brutal and torturous acts toward dogs, cats and horses.

No matter, say these Farm Bureau types. Once you start giving in to these animal rights fruitcakes, they say, they'll have a mangy stray dog more protected than an unborn child.

Why, they say, a man whose beloved horse goes irreparably lame right under him, and who shoots his beloved horse out of tender, tearful mercy, could be brought up on a felony charge and dispatched to state prison.

There is such a thing as a prosecutor's discretion. No elected prosecutor in Arkansas would bring such a charge.

They also say that an old boy ought to be allowed to make a mistake once. They say they're willing to go with a felony for a second act, but that, gosh, we should give a guy a break the first time and permit him the chance never to act so gruesomely again.

Send him to state prison after one instance and he might become hardened, they say -- as opposed to a mere torturer of helpless dogs.

What the Farm Bureau and the Poultry Federation and assorted other troglodytes need to face up to is simply this: that videotape.

Kevin Thomas, a detective for the Newton County sheriff's office, has seen it.

"You want just my opinion?" he asked in response to my question. "My opinion is that anybody seeing this tape would be for an animal cruelty felony. But this is torture, not just neglect. The one thing I want you to take from me on this is that this is outright torture. A lot depends on how you write it."

Thus the question: Do we, as a matter of our public policy, wish to see this man and boy shock and stomp a second set of pups before they're subjected to real legal trouble?

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.