Animal Protection and Animal 'Rights' in Hungary

Abstract

In Hungary, the first Act on Animal Protection, which aimed at handling and respecting animals as living creatures capable of feelings and suffering and thus deserving and entitled to protection, was adopted in 1998. Based on this, the Act contains several regulations which ensure that animals are protected against all possible kinds of avoidable physical or mental harm. Furthermore, it prohibits and imposes sanctions for any treatment that causes animals unnecessary suffering. The present study, outlooking at the end of this paper to the case for whether animals can have subjective rights, undertakes to focus on such regulations with the intent of verifying that the current Hungarian regulation harmonizes with modern European trends; in fact, to a certain extent (e.g. by applying criminal sanctions for animal torturing), it even provides guidelines for those trends.