Man convicted of killing cats, but other animal killers remain free
A man has been convicted of killing nine cats and injuring a further seven. The attacks took place in Brighton between October 2018 and June 2019 and confounded police for months. Steve Bouquet, a shopping centre security guard, was finally caught after being filmed acting suspiciously on a CCTV system set up by the guardian of one of his victims. He has also been convicted of carrying a knife and will be sentenced at a later date.
Now that the Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill, which raised the maximum prison sentence for animal cruelty from six months to five years, has come into force, we might expect Bouquet to receive a sentence that more appropriately reflects the repeated acts of violence he committed against animals. However, he has not been convicted on charges of animal cruelty, but on 16 charges of criminal damage, as the cats are legally the property of their guardians. Perversely, this might result in even more prison time than he would receive under animal cruelty charges, as the maximum sentence for damaging or destroying someone else’s property is ten years - double that for killing an animal.
While it’s great news that Bouquet has finally been caught, the case highlights the massive disparity between how society views the killing of companion animals compared with the routine killing and mutilation of other sentient beings. Bouquet’s killing spree and subsequent trial have been extensively covered by the media. Whenever a story of cruelty or thoughtless neglect towards companion animals emerges, social media users pile on to condemn the perpetrator. The death of a companion animal will of course be extremely distressing for their guardian, yet many of the people who are outraged about cruelty to companion animals they don’t know will consume the flesh of abused animals without a second thought. While the media may report on ‘shocking’ investigations of cruelty on farms, the cruelty of many standard farm practices remains widely accepted.
This cognitive dissonance plays out in a variety of contexts. With the ongoing terrifying heatwaves in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere, there have been articles written about how to keep companion animals cool, and reports on the SPCA seizing a dog who was held in a crate strapped to the back of an RV in British Columbia while the province sweltered in temperatures breaking 40 degrees Celsius. But as We Animals Media and Canadian journalist Jessica Scott-Reid have pointed out, Canada has no laws against transporting farmed animals for slaughter in extremes of heat or cold, but almost no one is reporting on how the heatwaves are harming these animals.
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In the UK, parliament recently debated stopping the rising number of dogs with cropped ears after more than 100,000 people signed a petition and campaigning by the British Veterinary Association and RSPCA. Meanwhile, numerous forms of mutilation are legally permitted to be carried out on farmed animals. Pigs often have their tails docked to prevent tail biting, a reaction to the physical and mental stress induced by conditions on intensive farms. Chickens are debeaked for similar reasons. Sheep have their tails docked to prevent their faeces from sticking to their wool and causing blowfly strike. Cows have their ears clipped, tagged, or notched for purposes of identification. Male cows are castrated and dehorned.
When it comes to slaughtering animals for food, the Yulin dog meat festival routinely provokes outrage, while the number of ‘conventional’ farmed animals - particularly chickens - slaughtered globally each year keeps rising. More than 70 billion are now killed annually - ten for every person on the planet. Out at sea, the numbers are even more mind-boggling, with an estimated 0.79 to 2.3 trillion fish (around 80 to 96 million tonnes) caught from the wild each year. A further 100 million tonnes of fish a year are raised on farms.
The number of animal deaths from agriculture, fishing, and aquaculture doesn’t end with those directly slaughtered for food. All these industries involve the killing of wild animals too. It’s estimated that at least 300,000 whales and dolphins are caught and killed as bycatch in fisheries every year. Predators such as wolves are often killed by ranchers to protect farmed animals from predation, with the US and Norway being wolf killing hotspots. The UK is currently in its eighth year of culling badgers to stop the spread of bovine TB between cattle farms. More than 140,000 badgers have been killed so far under what the Badger Trust describes as a “misguided and fundamentally flawed” attempt to control bTB. These issues are usually viewed negatively by the public, yet the majority of people continue to support this destruction of wildlife by consuming meat and dairy.
In all likelihood, nobody will be charged with animal cruelty or even with criminal damage for any of this. Even in the most egregious cases of abuse of farmed animals, exposed over and over again by animal activists, the consequences for the farmers are financial at most, in the event that supermarkets decide to stop selling their products.
The murder, injury, and neglect of companion animals rightly enrages and upsets us. If only those reactions were a gateway for more people to feeling the same compassion for all animals. Maybe then the law would work more equally to protect them.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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