Sep 18 2008
Kill a Cat, Go to Jail
I know there are more important issues in the world today, but sometimes it’s the little things that upset me the most.
Apparently, some idiot who once almost played for the New York Mets and who appears in an episode of Sex in the City thinks that kciking and beating a cat after it bit him is justified. This article about the incident says he claims the cats death was accidental and yet the cat died with a torn tongue, collapsed ribs and a laundry list of injuries that made me ill, so I stopped reading it.
To be honest, I know nothing about this man except that he admits to kicking a cat. Assuming as a professional or almost professional athlete he is, well, let’s be generoius, and say about 200 pounds, he got angry because a cat bit him and then kicked it. I didn’t read enough to see if he admitted to doing it more than once as the injuries would suggest because the whole thing made me a little ill.
Okay, so it made me a lot ill.
It seems likely that if convicted the man, and boy am I using that term loosely, involved will pay a fine and maybe face a short sentence in the county jail. Unfortunately, animal cruelty is not taken seriously by many courts.
On further discussion with my cat Rain and I have come up with a punishment that we think suits the crime. First, we need an angry elephant, about ten times the size of this cat-beater. Then, we need a small enclosure so the cat-beater cannot escape from his tormenter. We might need to give the elephant a weapon too, since I doubt the cat-beater was naked when he killed Morris.
To be fair, I have tripped over my cat and accidentally kicked her. She was completely uninjured. So I have lots of trouble believing that this cat-beater did not mean to kill the cat. You don’t accidentally beat an animal to death.
The more humanitarian side of me wants to suggest that he needs anger management counseling and lots of it and psychiatric help, as it is pretty well accepted that people who hurt animals often move on to hurting people, but today I am not feeling that generous.
Rain tells me that the elephant analogy might be more apt if I made it a hungry tiger instead. Then, maybe this jerk could learn to respect cats.
I agree with you. Anyone who deliberately hurts an animal is a sicko and should be punished severely.
Wow… I hope this gets bigger exposure so maybe it will be taken more seriously. Thanks for sharing!
Recently I had trouble with young unsupervised neighbor kids wreaking havok. Other than be extremely loud and leave garbage everywhere, they also harass my cats during their “outside time”. They chase them and try to feed them chocolate cupcakes. The parents simply told me I’d “better keep my cats inside.” (sound threatening much?) So I asked the police to serve them a noise complaint and the police said it’s ok for them to chase cats, pull their tails, etc. and that they “had to do worse” to be considered animal cruelty. That seems so wrong to me.
So many things are not right in this world, but I think there needs to be more education in this society and focus on anger/feeling management. There’s no reason to do that much to a cat for a bite. We once saved a cat hit on the freeway and she bit my mother very hard in fear. We just continued to rescue her.. there’s no reason for retaliation, especially in an animal that doesn’t conceive the eye for an eye mentality.
It makes me sick to know that people could be so cruel to innocent animals.
I think we need stricter punishment for animal cruelty and murders. I also think we need to teach children at a much younger age to respect animals and nature. There are so many things that can and should be done.
Maybe I should run for some office in 10 years or so when I can.
That is horrible! Animal cruelty needs to be taken much more seriously. I’m in complete agreement with Rain’s hungry tiger solution.
That is so terrible! For some crimes I really do believe the only way the person would learn was if the same thing was done to them.
With all the research that shows what people who abuse animals will go on to do later if they aren’t stopped, it’s a wonder things like this are still treated as trivial.
When he kills a person, some fool will say, “We never saw any signs that he was capable of such a thing!”
Gee what would he do if a child bit him?