A judicial center on animal abuse created in Toulouse
This is a first in Toulouse. The Court of Appeal has just created an Environment and Animal Abuse unit, with the aim of providing a rapid judicial response. “It is a social subject on which the public prosecutor must act with firmness, (the pole) will allow the monitoring of procedures, to intervene more quickly and to pronounce appropriate sentences.“, told Agence France Presse Franck Rastoul, attorney general at the Toulouse Court of Appeal.
In recent months, several cases of violence have moved, in the jurisdiction of the Toulouse Court of Appeal (Haute-Garonne, Tarn, Ariège, Tarn-et-Garonne): the rape of a cat with a stick, a dog massacred with an axe, another died in the middle of a heat wave, muzzled and tied to a fence.
To sanction abuses, specifies the prosecutor, the courts will have at their disposal “short circuits and simplified procedures for the least serious cases“and when the facts justify it, “you have to be able to confiscate the animal“, “impose a detention ban on its owner“.
Illustration of the action of the pole: last week, 53 dogs living in deplorable conditions were seized in Beaumont-sur-Lèze south of Toulouse, and designated to the SPA. Their owner was given a 10-month suspended prison sentence and a ban on keeping an animal for a year.
Violence, dog fights, bears in the Pyrenees…
“We can no longer deal with this amicably or only in the form of a fine (…) We sometimes have acts of barbarism on animals“, recalls Franck Rastoul for whom violence against people and violence against animals are two facets of the same problem. Dog fights in housing estates, trafficking in exotic animals, doping in horse riding, or the conditions of exploitation in the circuses or in the zoos described also in the collimator of the pole.
The magistrate will himself pilot the Environment and Animal Abuse division, also composed of a project manager and a lawyer. “You have to deal with all the facts. It is not because we sought ourselves in a situation of judicial embolism that we should not deal with these cases, they should not be trivialized. If the facts are serious, a systematic judicial response is needed. Society no longer accepts what was once tolerated“, he insists.
The field of action of the pole entered into operation on September 1 is vast. He is also competent on the destruction of protected species, and he will therefore follow the procedures concerning two bears killed in 2020 and 2021 in Ariège.