A curious case affecting the legal definition of " cruelty
to animals" was decided on Tuesday in the Exchequer Division of the High Court of Justice, at the Sittings in Banco. The magis- trates of Upper Geneur-Glynn, in Cardigan, bad decided that it was not cruelty not to shoot a mare,—which was in foal and kept for the sake of her expected foal,—sufferingfrom a hopeless injury to the leg, which caused her great torture whenever she moved about; and this decision the Court of Exchequer confirmed. But the magistrates had not remitted for appeal the point which both the Chief Baron and Baron Cleasby regarded as the one really at issue,—namely, whether it was not cruelty to place the poor thing in a field where she could only feed herself by inflicting great torture on herself through constant motion, instead of feeding her in a stall, where she need not have used the injured leg-to anything like the same extent. Surely the distinction thus drawn is rather fine, unless it be a mere interpretation of the defective wording of the particular statute. It is easy at least to con- ceive a case in which it would be cruelty even more frightful to keep the mare at all for the sake of the expected foal,—what- ever the mode of keeping her,—than it was to keep her in this superfluously cruel way in this particular case. If the statute does not contemplate as cruelty the case of purposely keeping alive for gain, a creature whose life is torture, surely the statute ought to be amended.
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