Yet look at your local shelter and you will see just a few of the perhaps 13 million animals who are killed each year because they have no value to anyone. Only when you go a bit too far, as the Fairfield youths did, brandishing their baseball bats to smash cats, and you commit acts of violence against animals that appear to society to be senseless, without profit except for sadistic pleasure, will the law consider your act to be unnecessary, and cruel. Those men could have sought employment in a slaughter house in Iowa and spent their whole lives killing animals, and never run afoul of the law. But when killing appears to be fun, or a prank, or outside the bounds of society's tolerance, the law will identify you as a threat, because you seem to relish violence in a way that could threaten human society. The data linking cruelty to animals to violence against humans is compelling.
Many violent criminals learn their skills by practicing on animals.
We protect ourselves when we prohibit cruelty to animals. It was not the law that let those cats down. Our appetite, literal and figurative, for the exploitation of our animal property did. Changes are made to this site on an ongoing basis. Contact us before using materials from the site for academic or litigation projects.