Sadly, the abuse of animals is nothing new to the human race, nor is it new to Malta. No doubt, man has been abusing our four legged friends since the first days of domestication all those millennia ago.

But, nevertheless, the recent discoveries of brutal abuse inflicted upon what most of us consider to be man’s best friend - as in the heart-wrenching story of Star and the horrific discovery this week of three Klieb tal-Fenek bound and thrown into the sea - are serving as eye openers.

And, as such, there is a positive side, a silver lining if you will, to the recent reports of animal brutality.

Now, it seems, there is a new sense of awareness and concern toward the issue raising its head in the country. This is not to say that there has hitherto been a lack of such qualities among the populace, what we intend is that there is something of a new civic conscience in this respect that is growing amongst our ranks.

People no longer appear willing to stand for inaction on the part of the authorities, the government, or politicians, who desperately need to enact new legislation to come down hard on these criminals. And we have little doubt that Parliament will heed the call and provide more fitting punishments for these criminals than what we have at present.

But, then again, once that is done, it is the courts that will need to throw the book, the entire book, at these criminals once they make it to the dock. In the area of illegal bird hunting, for example, the courts have been seen to be repeatedly soft on those that have been found guilty, despite a raft of new fines and custodial sentences enacted years ago.

Any person of sound mind agrees that animal cruelty is senseless, cold, blooded, callous and utterly condemnable. But, as condemnable as it may be, the criminals charged with such acts of brutality, when they are caught, are not condemned as they should be.

According to statistics published in another section of the media, eight people have been sentenced by the courts over animal cruelty over the last four and a half years – all of which were given suspended sentences.

And the thing is that message of relative leniency is being relayed to other abusers. Otherwise how could anyone – as callous as they may be – risk binding three large Klieb tal-Fenek together and hurling them into the sea, irrespective of whether they were dead or alive at the time? And, note, this was less than a week since about a thousand people attended a silent protest calling for harsher sentences in the memory of Star, now virtually a household name and who has, in the last days of her life, as well as in death, done so much for so many other dogs.

If a person can be so brutal with a dog, a cat or even a hedgehog, that person is only one step away from redirecting such savagery on his fellow human beings. Not only that, animal abuse, as we have seen in the cases of those ill-fated pharaoh hounds and Star, is an illness or at the very least the outward manifestation of an illness, one that needs to be treated.

For these ‘people’, for lack of a better word, the law must provide appropriate and mandatory custodial sentences, punitive fines, and therapy to set these individuals back on the right course in life.

Suspended prison sentences will simply not do. Not any longer. People are calling out for change and it is the politicians’ duty to see those calls answered.