Two recent criminal animal cases in Adams County have made clear a disturbing problem in the state’s animal cruelty statutes.

Under the eyes of current state law, it is worse to breed and train fighting dogs than it is to flat out kill a pet dog or cat.

Don’t get us wrong, we are no fans of dogfighting and we applauded when state legislators passed a strengthened dogfighting measure introduced by Sen. Bob Dearing, D-Natchez, in the 2018 session.

In fact, we would support further strengthening the state’s dogfighting bills.

However, the state’s simple animal cruelty statutes are too weak. The disparity in the two laws was made clear in the sentences handed down in two recent Adams County cases.

Tommie Queen was convicted in Adams County Circuit Court Nov. 7 on three of nine counts of felony dogfighting charges stemming from a November 2017 case in which more than 50 dogs were found on his property in horrid conditions when Adams County Sheriff’s officials responded to a dogfighting call.

Queen was sentenced to nine years in prison, three years on each guilty count.

By contrast, Landon Turner pleaded guilty to two counts of animal cruelty in Adams County Justice Court on Nov. 12 for shooting two pet dogs to death that he said were interfering with his deer hunt.

For his crime, Turner was sentenced to the maximum of six months under the state’s simple animal cruelty law but the judge took extenuating circumstances into account and suspended two months from each charge and combined the remaining time to one month in jail per charge to run concurrently, which means Turner will serve only 30 days in jail.

The law is clearly flawed when someone can willfully kill someone’s household dog or cat and serve a maximum of only six months while someone convicted of training or breeding dogs for fighting can serve three years for a first offense.

Lawmakers should rectify the discrepancy in the penalties between the state’s dogfighting laws and animal cruelty laws, beefing up penalties for both.

It is the humane thing to do.