Many times, young people – it is nearly always young adults both male and female – have committed gross acts of cat cruelty while someone else films it or they have managed to video it themselves. They then upload it to a social media site. This leads to uproar from decent minded animal lovers or even people who are not necessarily animal lovers because the act is so outrageously cruel, callous and ignorant. It is bound to draw sharp criticisms from anyone who has decent standards of behaviour. They report the event to the police. The criminal is sometimes apprehended and charged. So why do they do it?

The video was not published on the source for this page (Metro.co.uk and petrescuereport.com) because it is too cruel.

Here is another example and it is a classic. As usual it is utterly cruel. A ‘boy’ (I prefer young man – I have discovered that he is 16-years-of-age) is shown laughing before he throws a young cat 20 yards into the air onto a road. The video was published on Snapchat. It was spotted and re-uploaded to Twitter where it went viral.

A female witness says that the cat died of internal bleeding. However, subsequently we are told that the cat survived. He has a leg fracture.

Online users tracked down the event to Fontana, California. Twitter users complained in droves to the local police. They responded in a further Twitter tweet (see below):

Fontana police tweet

However, I believes that subsequently the Ontario, CA police stepped in and claimed that they have located the cat and the owner but not the culprit as I write. I am unclear where this took place!

The police are searching for the culprit. Several schools have been contacted in an effort to find this young man. Threats have been made against the accounts of the alleged culprit but we don’t have a name because the alleged criminal is underage and his name remains undisclosed. He is known therefore but as yet neither located nor arrested. The Inland Valley Humane Society is caring for the cat and assisting in the investigation.

To return to the question: why do this? It has to be a failure to instil normal standards of decency and a moral code into the brains of these youths and the blame for that must lie at the feet of the parents. That is probably an oversimplification but it is at the heart of the problem. These individuals just don’t see that they are doing wrong. They see it as okay and worse. They want to promote their actions on social media. They are showing off. They are proud of themselves. This has to be a complete breakdown in fundamental levels of education and morals. It is something that I’d have thought would be looked at by the authorities.

There may be another issue here: the internet. It distances people – and most users are young – from their actions. It is like another world, an unreal world which entices young people to do things that they would not normally do. It is possible that this young man wanted to impress people on social media. So the starting point might be social media. He decides to be cruel to a cat to attract attention. He doesn’t understand how cruel it is. But perhaps he would choose anything to try and impress but happened to choose a cat to throw. The motivation for the behaviour might be to stand out on social media, to be someone – and not necessarily to be cruel to a cat.