Tiger is recovering well.
My neighbor kitten Tiger got out one night and hasn’t been the same since. That night, someone cut off his ears and his tail. Tiger’s human mom told the police she saw two men drinking at a nearby picnic table. When officers looked around, they found blood in the yard and Tiger’s tail in a trash can. Police arrested one man who is suspected of torturing Tiger, but another man escaped, the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise was first to report on 24 September.
The brutality of Tiger’s wounds surprised even the police officers. “I’ve seen animals shot, hung and run over,” Detective Curle Price told the Gazette-Enterprise. “But I’ve never seen one mutilated like that. I’m an animal lover, and I can’t understand why anyone would do that to a kitten.”
As they healed, Tiger's ears were itchy.
Tiger’s mom said she is grateful to the police for taking her complaint so seriously. “Animals have no voice; no way of communicating with us,” Norma Sanchez told the Gazette-Enterprise. “We must take care of them. Right now, Tiger’s still hurting. He’ll barely let us touch him. I want to thank the police. I’m glad they caught him, and hope they find the other one.”
Tiger came to live with his forever family only three weeks before. His mom told my human that she picked Tiger out of the litter because his ears were so cute and made him look like a big cat. Tiger goes to my vet, which is where my human first met him, the morning after he was tortured. (I wrote about this meeting on my blog.) His mom was carrying him out of the vet’s office. The vet told us that she had done a good job of giving the kitten first aid. Tiger has been back to the vet, and a local nonprofit called ARF is helping to pay his vet bills, and our vet underwrote a lot of the cost of care. Some anipals have contributed to ARF’s fund and sent gifts to Tiger as well. If you want to contribute, specify that you want to help Tiger on ARF’s online donation page.
Dr. Larry Helms, one of the vets at Seguin Animal Hospital, treated Tiger.
“The mutilation done to Tiger duplicates that done to many pitbulls and other fighting dogs,” Barbara Upper of ARF said. “Until there is a cultural taboo defining these bloodsports, until there is an urge for enforcement of protection laws, until we call sadism what it is, we will continue to get what we tolerate. Tiger is a victim of our acceptance of brutality in our midst.”
The detective found the arrested man’s explanation that he and his cousin were drinking and the idea just “came into their heads” inadequate. So do I. I hope that the district attorney prosecutes the guy they did catch and that he is convicted. If the man is convicted, the law in Texas makes torture of a non-livestock animal a state jail felony that carries a punishment of no more than two years incarceration and a fine up to $10,000, according to section 42.092 of the penal code.
Some humans, like Upper, in Texas and other states don’t think the law goes far enough to deter animal cruelty. Some Texas lawmakers plan to introduce a bill that proposes a registry of animal abusers on the same model as the list of sex offenders that the state currently provides, according to KXAN in Austin. The law, if passed, would require adults convicted of felony animal cruelty to register (although most cruelty convictions in the state are for misdemeanors). If this law were to be enacted in next year’s legislative session, it could be the first statewide registry of its kind in the United States. Suffolk County, on Long Island in New York, however, has already started the very first local animal abuser registry.
The first animal abuser registry in the United States
The Suffolk County government wants to deter animal abuse by requiring adults who are convicted of felony animal cruelty to register annually for five years. The county Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals will maintain the registry of names, addresses and photos of convicted offenders, Newsday reported the day after the law passed on 12 October. The list will be online and open to the public, Newsday reported.
The Suffolk County SPCA predicted, based on historical data on prosecutions for animal abuse charges in the county, that the registry will probably list several dozen offenders. As of September, Newsday reported, several hundred animals had been victims of cruelty in Suffolk County this year.
The state legislature in New York has a similar measure under consideration, WHAM reported, but this bill proposes that the list be available to prosecutors, law enforcement officers and adoption agencies only. Law Blog of the Wall Street Journal reports that the Animal Legal Defense Fund is campaigning for a national registry.
Efforts to create statewide registries raise controversy
Several states, among them Louisiana, Rhode Island, Colorado, Tennessee and California, have considered and defeated similar proposals to create registries of animal abusers. In addition to the proposal in Texas, Connecticut is also considering a statewide registry of convicted animal abusers, the Newtown Patch reported.
The New York Times reported that opponents of the bills in Tennessee and Colorado had concerns about the cost of maintaining the registry. The Tennessee General Assembly estimated that a registry would cost about $26,000. Colorado also studied the potential cost of a similar registry and estimated it would cost about $18,000 in the first year and $11,000 annually after it was fully established. Suffolk County is at least partially funding its registry by charging registered offenders a $50 annual fee.
Links between animal abuse and violence against humans
“It’s a known fact,” Roy Gross, Chief of the Suffolk County SPCA, told the North Shore Sun as reported in the Huffington Post.“People who hurt animals hurt people too.”
A Suffolk County legislator told the Huffington Post, “Almost every serial killer starts out by torturing animals, so in a strange sense, we could end up protecting the lives of people.”
The FBI uses animal abuse as an indicator of potential for future violent behavior, the Times reported.
Research shows quite conclusively that animal, domestic and child abuse are related. For example, the Times reported, a study found that women who have been abused are 10 times more likely to report that their abusers have hurt or killed pets than are women who are not subjected to domestic violence. Another study found that pets had been abused in 88 percent of homes in which children suffered physical violence.
Based on studies of this sort, some U.S. states have enacted laws that require officers who work with animal abuse and child abuse to share information. The proponents of animal abuser registries rely on much the same logic in arguing that states should establish registries regardless of the cost. Registry advocates hope that the lists will be useful in preventing child abuse as well as in thwarting convicted abusers from adopting animals.
The idea of registering animal cruelty offenders generates a lot of controversy wherever and whenever it comes up. Insufficient evidence exists to determine if registering offenders, whether confidentially or publicly, will help to prevent animal abuse. I don’t claim to know how to solve this problem, but I do hope that humans will figure it out. For the sake of kitties like Tiger and all the thousands of other kitties, dogs, children and adult humans who are tortured and abused, humans need to stop the cycle of violence.
My human helped me with some of the research for this article because she is a skilled user of the Lexis-Nexis database. Reports on the cruelty against Tiger appeared in the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, Seguin Daily News, San Antonio Express-News, KSAT 12, FOX 29 and others. Amber Stubbs-Aydell took the photographs of Tiger and gave us permission to publish them.
{ 3 comments }
That would be cool! Because those peeps are just as unsafe as s*x abusers. The one guy that wore a red bandana on his head that they turned what he said into a song after his sister was near raped by a s*x offender, was asked to make a phone app that shows where each s*x offender lives in the surounding areas. Maybe this will get to that point too. Then also maybe peeps will see that its safer to keep kitties inside now days.
Thanx for da interesting article.
you need to have lawsand punish those monsters how torture animals and do the same to children we dont need those monsters in a free society so pout them to sleep otherwise they know they will not be punish,,,they are cowerds ,,,julie landmichael
Thank you for writing about this here and on your blog. The story makes us so sad and angry at the same time. What kind of person would do that to animal? I also don’t know whether a registry would help, but for sure it’s safer to stay indoors.
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