NEWS/VIEWS: An Australian woman living in Australia decided to strangle her dog and smother her cat, both to death, to put them out of their misery after they were being abused by her partner. This came out in court.
I have no further information so I’ll comment if I may. It appears that she was in court on animal abuse charges. She allegedly committed a crime.
I don’t have the full details so I’ll have to generalise. It is hard to avoid the first impression that one has: why the hell didn’t she take the animals to a rescue facility for rehoming? That’s the logical second step after taking the animals to a friend for temporary or permanent rehoming while she found new housing for herself. Perhaps she was trapped emotionally and unable to get away.
The natural choice would be to (1) protect the animals by all possible means available to her and (2) call the police and report animal cruelty and (3) get the hell out of the place and away from the abusive partner. And stay away. There must have been a barrier to one of these or all three.
The story has all the characteristics of a woman who was perhaps borderline mentally ill possibly because she was traumatised by the abusive partner who may have abused her as well. Her actions were extreme and traumatic for her and the animals. I’d suspect that the abusive partner couldn’t care less.
But killing two companion animals is compounding the criminality. The partner was abusing them which, on the face of it, is a crime and killing them is also a crime, possibly a more serious one. What is the attraction in commiting a crime to stop a lesser crime?
It is like destroying your car to stop criminals stealing it. Or leaving the person you love because you’re worried they’ll leave you.
Reported in The Courier which is a subscription only online newspaper. I don’t have a subscription.
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