A Compulsory Research Report Submitted to Mzumbe University – Mbeya Campus College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for an Award of The Bachelor of Laws (LLB) Degree of The Mzumbe University
In recent years, Animal production is seen as the backbone of many countries’ development, economy and food security in all over the world especially in Tanzania. Governments are promoting and encouraging modern production of animal products/commodities, as a business and export opportunity. Despite these advantages of domestic animals in our society, it has been evidenced that, there is increase of cruelty to domestic animals in Tanzania. Although animal cruelty has made a modest impression on society, a significant segment of our population nevertheless shares the belief that animals are property lacking a holistic set of basic rights, which in turn perpetuates egregious forms of abuse towards animals. State laws as well as the establishment of diverse non-governmental organizations exist to abate animal cruelty, but such institutions have lagged in creating effective control mechanisms in spite of the growth of this modern-day pandemic.
Due to that, this report research has discussed on the effectiveness of the law in Tanzania on protection of domestic animals against cruelty. In so doing, the report has also discussed on the strengths and weaknesses of the laws that amount to the increase of domestic animal’s cruelty in Tanzania. What are the legislative developments and their effectiveness, correlation of animal cruelty to violence among humans, and ways to strengthen control mechanisms through making a critical study from other jurisdictions.
To acquire the required data, the researcher employed field data collection methods as well as library research. The findings from the study indicate that, the weakness on the substantive part of the law such as non-establishment of effective institutions to deal with cruelty to domestic animals, provision of weak punishments to animal cruelty offences and lack of awareness by the society on protection of domestic animals have led the increase of this problem in Tanzania. The paper further reveals the dangers of increase of cruelty to domestic animals in national economy and on environmental perspective and lastly the researcher winds up by giving recommendations on what should be done to overcome the problem of domestic animal’s cruelty