Animal cruelty and coercive control

Kathryn Jurd, General Counsel at RSPCA NSW, spoke at the event titled “Animal Cruelty and Coercive Control: An RSPCA Perspective on Domestic Violence” and shared her unique insights and experiences in this area.

An experienced prosecutor, Jurd was admitted in 2009. Prior to joining the RSPCA, she spent a decade at the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) prosecuting various offences.

Jurd had carriage of the well-known greyhound live baiting case Kadir v The Queen; Grech v The Queen (Grech and Kadir case). Zeke Kadir and Donna Grech were charged on indictment with acts of serious animal cruelty. The charges related to the alleged use of rabbits as “live bait” to train racing greyhounds on Kadir’s property.

Jurd says “… that was my introduction to animal cruelty prosecutions.”

“In August 2017, I came in-house to the RSPCA, and I’ve been prosecuting animal cruelty on behalf of the RSPCA ever since. [Over the past seven years] I have been responsible for approximately 550 animal cruelty prosecutions.

“I had a decade long history prosecuting various types of violence, particularly against women, in the domestic violence space,” she says.

She says lawyers have always appreciated and understood the nature of coercive control even though its inclusion under s 54D of the Crimes Act is fairly recent.

As Jurd explains, “the processes of coercive control and the way conduct would be brought to bear against women are not unfamiliar to the criminal law practitioner in New South Wales. I come to the animal cruelty space with that background in mind.

“I suppose you can’t divorce that experience from my current obligations to prosecute offences that are committed contrary to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act in NSW,” she says.

When section 54D came into force, the provision caught the attention of those in the animal welfare space as Jurd says it specifically referred to the “mechanisms by which defendants might use animals to control women as part of the abusive behaviour that forms the course of conduct to which section 54D attends itself …”

She points out that it’s not “… uncommon for practitioners, either people within shelter workforces or animal rescue refuges that are run for the women and their children. So all of this is, sadly, very familiar to practitioners in this space.”

Fortunately, there are services available to help victims of domestic violence or those in need of assistance.

“The RSPCA has a wonderful domestic violence program in which a social worker would be allocated to their matter and the RSPCA would take care of their animals whilst they are leaving violent situations. We know that statistically, women delay leaving because of concern for pets. If the RSPCA is in a position to be able to alleviate some of that burden by taking the animals in, caring for them, providing them [with] veterinary treatment, while victim survivors are leaving these coercive relationships, then that’s a really important function that the RSPCA sees itself in providing,” says Jurd.

In her role, Jurd also sees violence occur in other forms including offending against animals. She says that it “happens at the same time, or similar timing to offending that happens in the domestic violence context.”

It is not uncommon for matters to be prosecuted by NSW Police relating to charges for assault or breaching apprehended domestic violence orders and for there to be an animal cruelty offence that is related to the domestic violence offence. “… Or sometimes they are completely separate prosecutions,” she says.

In her practice, Jurd perceives different types of abuse and abusive behaviour where “a defendant or perpetrator threatens to kill or assault an animal including threatening to give them away.

“… often there will be threats made about ‘if you leave me, I will give your pet cat away’ or something like that as punishment for past behaviour and as a threat to hang over the victim survivor to control future behaviour,” she says.

Interestingly, Jurd points out that there is some research surrounding threat and actual violence against animals or pets that preceded the relationship. “So, if a woman has come to the relationship with a pet, they often bear more of the brunt of the offending behaviour than pets that were gained during the course of the relationship,” she says.

Jurd has learned about the different ways in which perpetrators use the justice or judicial system to further control their victims. She shared an example of where parties were subject to an apprehended domestic violence order with non-association conditions. The parties had eight or nine horses located on a semi-rural property. The perpetrator refused to feed the horses, and the victim could not go to the property due to the orders.

This example, while sad, is by no means uncommon. “In the last financial year, [RSPCA] received 17,436 animal cruelty complaints across NSW. … animal cruelty is a state-based system because it sits within the criminal law and that [number (of complaints)] is slightly up from previous years,” says Jurd.

“Over time, what people think is acceptable treatment for animals is changing and we are seeing a slight uptick in complaints. I also think that the cost of living situation in Australia and internationally is now having an impact… .”

Legislative changes are welcomed in this area. “From our perspective, the really important factor that they’ve included is that [54FH] behaviour causes injury or death to an animal or makes use of an animal to threaten somebody,” she says.

These types of offences are generally heard in the Local Court and there are significant penalties attached. In some instances, where there has been aggravated animal cruelty, penalties up to 400 penalty units or 12 months imprisonment or both for an individual may be imposed. Jurd cites the decision in RSPCA v Hongyou Zou [2020] NSWLC 3 (Zou) as an example of the high penalties that can be imposed.

In Zou, the offender had two prosecutions brought against him under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1979. An RSPCA inspector visited Zou’s property and found a dog which had starved to death. The animal been deprived of food and water for an extended period of time.

Zou was sentenced to imprisonment of 16 months with a non-parole period of eight months.