From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000:

“For the first time, in a country
where human rights are routinely violated,
someone has been convicted of cruelty to
an animal,” London Observer Service correspondent
Martin Dayani recently reported
from Bogota, Colombia. District Judge
Elsa Lucia Romero, of Suba, a northern
Bogota suburb, jailed two men for three
months and fined them each the value of 35
grams of gold for allegedly setting a street
dog named L u c a s on fire with a blowtorch
and then leaving him to suffer for 24 hours
with the burns that eventually killed him.
“Legally this was a watershed,” Romero told
Dayani. “What was important in this case
was that people had reported the incident. I
considered that the death of the dog caused
upset among the local residents,” who
demanded justice even though the 10-year-old
Colombian cruelty law was so obscure that
Romero had difficulty finding a copy of it.
Continued Romero, “This case appears to
have given publicity to the wide-scale abuse
of animals in our society, which is important,
as ignorance surrounding the legal rights of
animals encourages impunity.” Added animal
advocate Emiliano Castro, “Colombians will
never achieve a peaceful society based on
human dignity and respect for one another if
we can’t first learn to respect the rights of our
brothers in the animal kingdom.”

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