Seminar to probe motives behind cat killings?

Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) and Leader Effectiveness Training (L.E.T.)

The RSPCA plans to examine the reasons why people commit cruelty to animals, in the wake of 'recent incidents' around Australia.

Even though people have been cruel to animals and have killed animals since the earliest times.

The latest occurred in Adelaide yesterday in which a cat was reportedly dragged behind a car in the southern suburbs says, Howard's ABC Online.

But I wonder if all the media attention has motivated the perpetrators of these violent acts to act out their frustrations on more and more cats?

Or if the media attention has motivated more media attention? To find more incidents and reports of more and more abused cats?

Police say they have good information on the type of car used but no one has been charged as yet.

I can't wait until they find these people can you?

Several witnesses reported seeing the cat being dragged for up to an hour by a white Tarago yesterday afternoon.

Police senior Constable Mick Abbott says investigators have a registration number for the vehicle suspected to be involved and the driver will face charges regardless.

But either these incidents have been noticed more now, because they are being reported more often? Or they have just been a problem now, so they are being reported more often? Or someone has an agenda to report them more often? And it makes me wonder!

Could it be because someone, somewhere, decided that as many reason that can be found to lock people up using the 'Criminal Punishment System' ought to be found and new laws need to be drafted because we as a society have an unlimited capacity to lock people up? Or is it because of the latest cat craze?

RSPCA spokeswoman Emily Vatkovich says it will be impossible to do an autopsy on the cat and the society is now assuming the cat was dead before it was dragged behind the car.

But she says it is still a shocking act nevertheless.

"Regardless of whether this cat was alive or dead when it was dragged along by the car, I think we should all be extremely concerned that people are going to these lengths to inflict such injuries on an animal and it is just an extremely brutal act of cruelty," she said.

Noone would disagree with that and of course we are extremely concerned for the cat, dead or alive however, not concerned as much as Bob Carr and the corporate media seem to be, because animal cruelty has been going on ever since the year dot.

When I was a child I seen adults place cats under milk crates and throw bungers at them to scare them away from the neighbourhood.

I've seen people take them far away from home and dump them just to get rid of them.

Parents have told me their children were the perpetrators of this crime too. Children who dumped cats or kittens into a drain or down the toilet and continued to flush it like a game because they had no idea they were being cruel.

But what concerns me is the intimation that new legislation should be drawn up to criminalise offenders using the police force. And or larger penalties for people who have offended against an animal, rather than a stern warning, fines and or education that can give them some guidance. Because many of these instances will be young adults learning about their environment opposed to a deliberate criminal act.

You can't blame children or youth for how they are being raised but you can raise parents that can raise children and pets better. Of course it takes a little financial incentive like 'Parent Effectiveness Training' that acronym incidentally stands for P.E.T. get it? That way not only do you protect pets but people too. It goes without saying so why am I saying it? I know, because we need a seminar to work it out? Why didn't I think of that?

If the intention is to learn more about the people/animal relationships in relation to crime in the community or domestic violence that's okay, but if what is really behind this seminar is new laws to validate and criminalise people based on what they have done to an animal in relation to what they could or might do to a human being, then I can certainly point you to the fact that this is nothing new.

So why now? And why not just spend more money ensuring parents get training so that kids get trained and don't go on and mistreat anything or anyone else. because they're bored or cannot think of a useful way to use their energy? Or even if they know, that using their energy usefully, serves a better purpose in life.

Ms Vatkovich says the society will use a seminar next month to examine the type of person who commits such an act.

"The main cause of the seminar is actually to look into people that abuse animals and then actually go on to act violently towards humans," she said.

"So I think it's a really important issue that needs more research done into it."

Then why was that not an important issue before?

Some animals just like children get hurt because they are disobedient and their carer has no idea about how to reach and agreement with the subservient they care for, whether that be a small child, animal or insect

Nurture Nature

Just like cradling a baby in your arms, a cradle swings below us nurturing us, if we care for all living things in our wonderful Universe.

Educate don't incarcerate!

During the witch-burning era of the 17th century, witches' cats were put into baskets and burned alongside the witches not that that should have anything to do with the current mistreatment of cats. History proves that cats have been mistreated by the human race.

So this is no special event even though it has maintained it's headlines in the mainstream media and that all of a sudden Bob Carr needs to make new laws to lock up people or for longer.

Since the first cat story recently was put on the media spot light and now every cat that has every been found makes the headlines, does that mean we need new legislation to incarcerate citizens who have been cruel to a cat?

By Wicked Witch 29 January 05

Related:

The Cat and the Law

FROM the epoch of the cat's godhood down to the modern moment laws have been passed to protect the cat, laws which have demanded that man treat the cat in such and such a fashion.

Egyptians cat-killers were punished by death. Diodorus writes of a brave Roman soldier who was the victim of this law.

It is interesting to compare this extreme measure with the old English common law which held both cats and dogs as "no property, being base by nature," but it is also well to remember that at one time in England larceny was punished by the death penalty.

If a cat had been considered property the theft of a puss would have led the thief to the block or the scaffold. The English "Rule of Nuns" issued in the early thirteenth century, forbade the holy women to keep any beast but a cat. A canon of a date nearly a hundred years earlier forbade nuns, even abbesses, from wearing costlier skins than those of lambs and cats.

The Welsh laws concerning domestic lions were formulated in the tenth century. In 1818 a decree was issued at Ypres in Flanders forbidding the throwing of pussies from high towers in commemoration of a Christmas Spectacle. And today the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals endeavours to make the punishment fit the crime for anyone who maliciously mistreats a cat.