Four Florida men were charged this month with three counts of animal cruelty after police discovered dead chickens, pigeons and doves that the men had killed apparently as part of a Santeria sacrifice. A 17-year-old minor was also arrested.
Santeria is a combination of Roman Catholicism and west African beliefs. The religion first took hold in Caribbean nations and has hundreds of thousands of followers in the United States.
In reporting on the arrest, both the Tampa Tribune and the Associated Press wrongly claimed that a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court ruling held animal sacrifices as protected under the Constitution. But that is not at all what the U.S. Supreme Court held.
Instead, what the Court said was that cities and states could not single out ritual animal sacrifice and make it illegal. So a city that allowed people to kill chickens within the city limits, could not pass a law making it illegal to kill chickens as part of a religious ceremony.
But the upshot of that ruling is that if a municipality or state has an existing animal cruelty statute that is applied across the board and the religious sacrifice of an animal violates that statute, then the city or state can prosecute that act. If the animals in this case were killed in a way that violates Florida or Miami’s existing anti-cruelty statutes, then the defendants will not be able to fall back on the First Amendment as a defense.
Source:
Ritual killings rate as cruelty, police charge. Jennifer Bars, Tampa Tribune, August 18, 2002.