FROM WELFARE STATUTES TO THE PENAL CODE: ANALYZING THE ENFORCEMENT CRISIS AND SENTENCING DISPARITIES IN INDIA’S ANTI-CRUELTY LEGAL FRAMEWORK

Abstract

India regulates cruelty to animals through three statutes that were never designed to work together. First is the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960; the welfare statute whose penalties have not been revised since enactment and which today prescribes a fine as low as ten to fifty rupees for a first offence; second one is Section 325 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, a general penal provision inherited from the Indian Penal Code, 1860 that treats the killing or maiming of an animal as an offence against property and permits imprisonment of up to five years; and the third is the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, which imposes a mandatory minimum sentence of three years for offences against species specified under Schedule I of the Act. This paper aims to looks at the major problems with how animal cruelty laws are written and enforced in India. How the same act of cruelty can attract three fundamentally different sentencing outcomes and argues that this disparity is not incidental but structural, rooted in the doctrinal confusion between animals as property. This paper looks at a strange legal contradiction that a person faces a much harsher punishment for hurting an animal if it is treated as someone’s “property damage” under criminal law, rather than as a “living, feeling being” under the PCA Act because this welfare statute is rarely invoked to its full even nominal effect. Using landmark court rulings like the Supreme Court’s Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja (2014) case this study explains why India’s animal laws are failing on the ground. It concludes with proposals for statutory harmonisation that would align penal severity with the gravity of the underlying conduct rather than with the classificatory scheme inherited from nineteenth-century property law.