Except as otherwise provided in Section 97-41-16 for a dog or cat, if any person shall intentionally or with criminal negligence override, overdrive, overload, torture, torment, unjustifiably injure, deprive of necessary sustenance, food, or drink; or cruelly beat or needlessly mutilate; or cause or procure to be overridden, overdriven, overloaded, tortured, unjustifiably injured, tormented, or deprived of necessary sustenance, food or drink; or to be cruelly beaten or needlessly mutilated or killed, any living creature, every such offender shall, for every offense, be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Miss. Code Ann. § 97-41-1
Living creatures not to be cruelly treated
Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case People v. Allen (1983)
Most recently applied in United States v. Richards (June 2014)
Codes, 1880, § 804; 1892, § 1014; 1906, § 1091; Hemingway’s 1917, § 817; 1930, § 841; 1942, § 2067; Laws, 2011, ch. 536, § 2, eff from and after passage (approved Apr. 26, 2011
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Mississippi Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Mississippi statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.