Legal Regulation of Liability for Cruelty to Animals in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

Currently, the problem of prosecuting persons for cruelty to animals is actual for many countries. Legislative regulation and attitude to the problem of animal protection is a certain indicator of the civilization of society. Historically, China has all the prerequisites for the formation of a developed system of protection animals from cruelty, but at present, according to international experts, the People’s Republic of China is practically at the very beginning of the formation of legislation on the protection of animals. Hong Kong and Taiwan, as two separate administrative units, have more progressive legislation in this area. The purpose of the article is to research the legal experience of the People’s Republic of China of establishing responsibility for cruelty to animals. The authors set the following tasks: to analyze the regulatory legal acts in the field of regulating the responsible treatment of animals in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and to identify positive and negative trends. As part of the work on the article, dialectical, comparative legal, and formal legal methods were used. The research revealed problems in the legislation of the People’s Republic of China, as well as to establish a trend in Chinese society aimed at protecting animals from an ethical point of view, and not from an economic one.