Be a Good Person This Winter, Bring Your Dogs Inside Or Be Fined

With today we got our first bitterly cold day and with many more to come and surely enough snow to bury your car throughout the next couple of months.

So, looking ahead to the winter months it's always a good idea to think of our animals and how the weather is going to be affecting them. They get cold just like we do and it is actually animal cruelty to leave them outside chained up for more than 30 minutes here in Wyoming according to Animallaw.info.

The statute was updated in 2011 and it says,

"Wyoming amended its cruelty law in early 2011 to include the new offense of "household pet animal cruelty." Under the general anti-cruelty part of the law, a person commits cruelty to animals if he or she  knowingly and with intent to cause death, injury or undue suffering overrides an animal or drives an animal when overloaded, unnecessarily or cruelly beats, tortures, torments, injures, mutilates or attempts to kill an animal, or carries an animal in a manner that poses undue risk of injury or death.  The neglect component provides that person who has charge and custody of any animal and unnecessarily fails to provide it with the proper food, drink or protection from the weather, or cruelly abandons the animal, or fails to provide the animal with appropriate medical care is also guilty of cruelty."

You can be fined up to $750 for this kind of animal cruelty by not providing your animal with proper sheltering from the elements here in Wyoming and up to $5,000 in other cases of animal cruelty.

So if you do have a household pet that goes to the bathroom outside, remember to bring them in after they are done doing their business.