SOUTH FLORIDA, USA – NEWS AND COMMENT: If you don’t mind, I won’t go onto great detail but Cheryn Smilen, 56, pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges after she starved cats that she had hoarded in her small apartment. She was a self-style cat rescuer. In truth she was a cruel cat ‘murderer’.
As usual she was exposed by the horrible ammonia smell leaking out of her apartment. They investigated and found emaciated cats, and some cats who’d been dead for months. There was unused food in the apartment. Cannibalism had occurred.
The reporting is sparse. It’s better that way. We can imagine the horror of it. The slow agonising death of the cats. The pain of hunger. The betrayal. No one visiting. No one to care for them.
She was sentenced to 364 days in jail – a year. It is unusual to receive a year’s jail sentence for animal cruelty even of this kind in the West. She has been banned from owning or rescuing animals. I don’t know the length of the ban. I hope that it is for the remainder of her life. She’s not fit to do it. You have to be very callous, almost psychopathic to confine cats to an apartment and not feed them at all.
Here is a video which is embedded into this page. The video is held on another server and if it disappears on that server, it will stop working here. If that has happened, I’m sorry but I can’t control it.
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