The early anti-cruelty laws in the US were often included in morals and decency sections, along with laws that prohibited adultery, fornication, blasphemy, incest, digging up graves, and bestiality. E.g., New Hampshire Rev. Stat. ch. 219 § 12 (1843), Offences Against Chastity, Decency and Morality: https://www.animallaw.info/statute/...ffences-against-chastity-decency-and-morality Anti-cruelty laws were often justified on the grounds that cruelty to animals morally harmed the person perpetrating the cruelty and/or those who witnessed it. Anti-cruelty laws were sometimes justified on the grounds that animal cruelty was a public nuisance. And, of course, the earliest laws were often only a matter of property crime--some laws today retain this character or wording, in which an act is only illegal when done by someone who doesn’t own the animal.
The most obvious reason for these confused attempts to justify anti-cruelty laws is because the real reason for and purpose of these laws is in direct conflict with the ordinary perverted ways that humans use and treat animals, namely slaughtering them in order to eat their flesh.
Nevertheless, even by the end of the 19th century it began to be recognized by some that the reason for anti-cruelty laws is not because cruel treatment of an animal is a public nuisance, not because it harms the morals of the perpetrator or witness, and not because cruelty is a property crime. Rather:
This statute is for the benefit of animals, as creatures capable of feeling and suffering, and it was intended to protect them from cruelty, without reference to their being property, or to the damages which might thereby be occasioned to their owners [. . .] The common law recognized no rights in such animals, and punished no cruelty to them, except in so far as it affected the right of individuals to such property. Such statutes remedy this defect [. . .] To disregard the rights and feelings of equals, is unjust and ungenerous, but to willfully or wantonly injure or oppress the weak and helpless is mean and cowardly. Human beings have at least some means of protecting themselves against the inhumanity of man,--that inhumanity which 'makes countless thousands mourn,' --but dumb brutes have none. Cruelty to them manifests a vicious and degraded nature, and it tends inevitably to cruelty to men. Animals whose lives are devoted to our use and pleasure, and which are capable, perhaps, of feeling as great physical pain or pleasure as ourselves, deserve, for these considerations alone, kindly treatment.
Stephens v. State, 3 So. 458-59 (Miss. 1887)
How did you conclude that? What is the premise by which you deduced that answer? Obviously isn't necessary for humans to slaughter animals to fill their bellies.
