Seeing Animals as Victims, Not Property

To receive justice, you first have to be visible.

That is the point at the heart of Serrin Rutledge-Prior’s 2026 paper on cruelty prosecutions in Australia, and it should rattle anyone who still thinks animal law is mainly a matter of “better enforcement.” The problem is deeper than that. The law does not merely fail animals here and there. The legal system struggles to recognise who the victim is.

Rutledge-Prior looked at 552 cruelty prosecutions involving “pet” animals across Australia between 2011 and 2025. Even with this supposedly more protected group, the pattern was ugly. Animals were repeatedly treated as background objects in cases that were, in theory, about violence done to them. They were there, but not really. Present, but flattened. Visible only through the interests of the humans around them.

That is what makes this paper so important. It is not just about cruelty. It is about institutional erasure.

The law likes to posture as neutral, principled, civilised. But when it comes to other animals, it still speaks the language of ownership. And once someone is legally framed as property, justice becomes distorted from the start.

You can see this in the cases Rutledge-Prior highlights. Humans convicted of severe neglect were still allowed to keep some animals. A woman who neglected 156 animals, including chickens trampling each other to death in cramped cages, was still allowed to keep her dog. Another magistrate avoided recording a conviction against a woman who severely neglected horses because a full ban would affect her livelihood. Think about what that means. The court explicitly weighed a human’s economic convenience against the basic interests of the animals she had already failed.

Try imagining that logic applied consistently elsewhere. A childcare provider gravely neglects children, but the court worries that stopping her from caring for children might harm her income. It sounds absurd because it is absurd. Yet when the victims are animals, the system says it with a straight face. That is because the legal system still treats them first as property and only second, if at all, as beings.

The paper identifies another pattern that should enrage people. When large numbers of animals are harmed, the law often stops counting them as individuals. Seventy-nine cats can become one cruelty charge. Fifty birds can become three charges. More animals does not necessarily mean more recognition. In fact, the opposite often seems to happen. The larger the number, the easier it becomes for the system to blur them into a single mass.

This is exactly how speciesism works. Individuality disappears once animals are reduced to a category, a stockpile, a hoard, a flock, a breeding group, a problem. The victim stops being someone and becomes an undifferentiated scene.

A human court would never pretend that harming dozens of people amounted to a single victim in any morally serious sense. But for animals, the law regularly performs this vanishing act. Their bodies count as evidence. Their individuality does not. Then there is the most revealing point of all: the law does not even consistently treat death as a more serious harm than non-lethal cruelty.

Rutledge-Prior shows examples where someone who killed animals received a lighter penalty than someone whose victim survived. In one case, two dogs were shot dead and the penalty was lower than in another case where a dog survived poisoning. In another, a dog who died from being left chained without shade on a hot day resulted in a lower penalty than a dog who was beaten but survived.

For humans, the law recognises suffering and death as harms to the victim. For animals, pain may be acknowledged, but death still slips into the old property logic. Damage has occurred, yes, but not in the full moral sense reserved for persons. The animal’s life is not consistently treated as something that belonged to them.

That is why this paper matters beyond the courtroom. It exposes a wider lie in liberal democracies that talk endlessly about dignity, individuality, and equal concern while excluding animals from the moral community those words are supposed to protect.

Rutledge-Prior argues that animal cruelty should be understood not just as an invisible crime, but as a crime against invisible victims. That distinction matters. Animals are not only hidden because cruelty happens behind closed doors or because institutions keep poor records. They are already invisible before the abuse begins, because the law does not start from the premise that they are subjects with claims of their own.

Animals should be recognised as crime victims. Not symbolically. Not sentimentally. Formally. That means dignity. Representation. Protection from abusers. Charging and sentencing that reflect the number of individuals harmed. A legal framework that stops treating violence to animals as a vague offence against public decency and starts treating it as what it is: violence against someone.

None of this requires faith in harsher punishments. Rutledge-Prior is right to caution against that. More cages will not fix a system already built on domination. But prevention, transparency, legal representation, and actual recognition of animals as victims would at least begin to disrupt the machinery of erasure.

If the law can only see animals as property, then it cannot give them justice. And that should force a more uncomfortable question.

What does it say about a society when even its most “protected” animals can be abused and still not be fully recognised as the victims?