The House has taken up HB 650, Rep. Ken Andrus' animal cruelty bill; the House voted to suspend its rules to allow the bill to come up now, though it was on the 2nd Reading calendar. Andrus, R-Lava Hot Springs, said his initial feeling as he came to the Statehouse this year was "that we didn't need that, and that if the public wanted to pass an initiative, they could do that on their own." But he said after listening to other animal cruelty legislation "that was designed to prevent an initiative being on the ballot, or to prevent it being successful, I decided in my mind ... that maybe there are some instances where animal cruelty deserves a felony penalty."

His bill includes a ban on cockfighting, a definition of animal torture, and felony penalties for a third offense of torture of a companion animal. "Most of these heinous offenses that we hear about and deal with ... are usually companion animals," he said. "You don't see a person torturing a horse the same way that they torture a companion animal, if they have that within them to be torturous."

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