LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has held the trained animals used to take revenge from rivals are the “weapon of offence” and the culprits cannot get away from the clutches of law by camouflaging the “intentional crime” as an accident.
Muhammad Azeem approached the LHC seeking pre-arrest bail in a case of prompting his hound to bite his arch-rival when he was passing through his fields.
Resultantly, the complainant of the case got seriously injured and a first information report (FIR) was lodged against the suspect at Kasur police station after the medical examination of the injured person.
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Dismissing the suspect’s bail plea, Justice Tariq Saleem Sheik ruled that on the basis of the available evidence, it is established that there is also an old rivalry between the suspect and the complainant. So, section 289 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) does not apply as ‘Negligence’.
The court maintained that it is well-settled that a seemingly inoffensive thing may become dangerous when ‘under the circumstances, in which it is used or threatened to be used, causes death or other serious physical injury or is readily capable of causing it.’
The judge said the penal codes in most jurisdictions do not contain specific provisions to cater for the situations in which a canine is used to attack or threaten a human or to commit a crime (robbery, for instance) but the courts do recognise it as a ‘weapon of offence’.
The judge mentioned that a Washington court in the USA had convicted a dog owner in 2007 of second-degree assault on a police officer with a pit bull (dog).
Citing another case of USA courts, the court mentioned that the suspect commanded her Dobermann to attack two victims, which inflicted significant injuries.
The judge mentioned that in the PPC, 1860, only section 289 deals with animals negligence.
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He stated that the application and scope of section 289 of PPC are best illustrated by an Indian court in the pre-partition era when a person in Dadu (Sindh) tethered his horse to a tree in the street and went to a shop. After some time, a man came that way leading his camel, and when they passed by the tree the applicant’s horse kicked the man and injured him. The horse owner was booked by the police and argued in the court that the animal was not of vicious character and there was no evidence to the contrary.
The high court ruled that the applicant was guilty of negligence and upheld his conviction under section 289 of PPC.
In the current case, there is a specific allegation against the petitioner that he sicced his dog on the complainant which nipped his right leg near the ankle. Muhammad Yousaf and Babar Bashir have got their statements recorded and according to them, the incident was not an accident. The court said the medical evidence also corroborates the visual account.
Hence, the offence is non-bailable, hence, the bail petition is dismissed, the judge held.
In the end, the judge stated that in parts of medieval Europe from approximately 1280 until 1750, animals that had harmed humans were sometimes prosecuted and punished for their misdeeds. Domestic animals were tried in the secular courts and, if necessary, were exposed to the same terrors of public execution as were humans. Wild animals and ‘vermin’ were tried in the ecclesiastical courts and, if found guilty, were subject to the course of a malediction.
