A Rare Behind the Scenes Glimpse at the Ruthless Murders of Two Cats by an Indiana Veterinarian Exposes All Those Who Claim That Lethal Injections Are Humane to Be Barefaced Liars

The Butcher of Knightstown, James A. Wilson

"Look, just stop. I'll take him home. I'll put a bullet in his head. It would be a much kinder way for him to go."
-- Ditty's unidentified female owner

Evil and moralless men and women always have been around but it used to be that the hideous crimes that they perpetrated against cats were pretty much confined to specific geographic locations. Technological advances have changed all of that and nowadays there is not a corner of the planet that is safe from their wicked designs.

Perhaps even more importantly has been the invention of language which has made possible not only the dissemination of lies but worldwide indoctrination as well. "Language was our secret weapon, and as soon as we got language we became a really dangerous species," biologist Mark Pagel of the University of Reading told The New York Times on April 25, 2011. (See "Ancient Clicks Hint Language Is Africa-Born.")

It therefore might not be unfair to conclude that a good share of the world's evils have their genesis in the corruption of language. Take for instance the ancient Greek word euthanasía which literally means an easy death. Much later in history its meaning was expanded to include the snuffing out of the lives of animals and, on rare occasions, humans that were deemed to be suffering from incurable diseases and conditions. Today, its connotation has been so corrupted as to encompass the wholesale slaughter of tens of millions of cats and other animals all around the world each year simply because their owners are, inter alia, to cheap to medicate them, too lazy to care for them, or simply want rid of them for a variety of reasons.

To make a long story short, euthanasia has now become synonymous with cold-blooded murder. Almost as importantly as the commission of these dastardly deeds themselves, there is absolutely nothing either painless or humane about these so-called euthanizations regardless of whatever guises that they may take or how pretty the language that animal owners, shelters, and veterinarians employ in order to cloak the ugly truth.

Another huge problem is that owners, shelters, and veterinarians carry out their diabolical atrocities in secret and far from the prying eyes and ears of the hoi polloi. Out of sight accordingly translates into out of mind.

Now thanks to two complaints filed with Indiana Attorney General Curtis Theophilus Hill, Jr., the public has been made privy to exactly what goes on behind the scenes in the surgeries of veterinarians who not only kill cats but for a handsome profit as well. Specifically, on January 5th Hill filed a complaint with the Indiana Board of Veterinary Examiners (IBVE) in Indianapolis alleging that sixty-four-year-old practitioner James A. Wilson, operator of the Knightstown Veterinary Hospital at 8562 West US 40, had failed to "humanely, kindly, and peacefully euthanize two cats." Knightstown, located fifty-one kilometers east of Indianapolis, is perhaps best known to the outside world as the setting of the 1986 basketball movie, Hoosiers.

The first complaint concerns a fifteen-year-old cat named Sweetpea that Wilson dispatched to the devil on February 13, 2016. In behavior more commonly associated with the bulldogs that he breeds as an avocation than that befitting an animal doctor, Wilson began his assault upon Sweetpea by roughly removing her from her carrier and then grabbing her by the scruff of her neck. He next bound the front paws of the allegedly sick and purring female with masking tape before proceeding to tie one of her rear appendages to the examination table with a piece of twine.

"Please don't do that to her," Sweetpea's unidentified female owner reportedly pleaded with him according to The Star Press of Muncie's February 6th edition. (See "Veterinarian Accused of Cruel Euthanizations.") "Please don't treat her like that."

Not only did Wilson demonstrate the bedside manner of a boa constrictor on that occasion but he also was in such a hellfire hurry that he had great difficulty even locating a vein into which to inject the poison that was destined to rob Sweetpea of her precious life. All of that ultimately proved to be too much for the woman to witness.

After she had withdrawn, her father stormed into the killing theatre and demanded of Wilson why that he had Sweetpea stretched out and trussed to the examining table. The vet responded by telling him that he was scared to death that the cat was going to bite him and if that happened he would have to cut off her head and send it to a laboratory for analysis.

All of that is, of course, pure nonsense. First of all, anyone who does not possess the prerequisite savoir-faire in order to properly restrain a cat does not have any business practicing veterinary medicine. Equally importantly, it is difficult to see how that such an obviously callous and incompetent individual could even begin to properly treat any cat.

The most likely explanation to that conundrum is that Wilson considers all the cats that he is being paid to kill as garbage and therefore does not recognize any need whatsoever to treat them as sentient beings. It additionally is entirely conceivable that killing cats constitutes a lion's share of his practice and with that being the case he has forgotten how to humanely treat any cat that has the misfortune to wind up at his surgery. His modus operandi is therefore to whack them as quickly and expeditiously as possible, collect his blood money, and then move on to other patients.

Secondly, while it is certainly possible that there could be an Indiana statute on the books that mandates the beheading of all cats that bite individuals, such a law is pure madness. Au contraire, if anyone is to be decapitated it should be lamebrains like Wilson and certainly not any cat.

Much more importantly, it is difficult to understand how that any practitioner of veterinary medicine could possibly avoid being occasionally scratched and bitten by his feline patients. "Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched," Miguel de Cervantes pointed out a long time ago.

Despite the hysterical rantings of cat-haters and the uninformed, scratches are not any big deal. They may sting and even bleed a little but that is pretty much the extent of the damage that they inflict upon recipients. Nevertheless, they should be irrigated with either soap and water, iodine, zinc, hydrogen peroxide, or vinegar as a precautionary measure but that is about all the attention that they normally require.

Bites are an altogether different matter owing to the bacteria that cats carry around with them in their mouths. Even so, they usually can be remedied through irrigation, a squeezing out of any residual blood that comes to the surface, and an application of such common over-the-counter antibiotics as bacitracin, neomycin sulfate, and polymyxin b sulfate.

Depending upon the location of the wound, it may be necessary to bandage it so as to keep the antibiotics in situ. If any complications other than a minimal degree of swelling should develop, a trip to a doctor's office for stronger antibiotics would be perhaps advisable.

Finally as far as this topic is concerned, there could not possibly be so much as a shred of validity in Wilson's thinking given that just about all owners are accidentally scratched and bitten by their cats from time to time. Besides, if any veterinarian adhered to his asinine advice he soon would find himself not only bereft of feline patients altogether but also in court defending himself against unlawful death lawsuits as well as larceny charges.

With the money on the table, Wilson was not about to allow Sweetpea to escape with her life and through sheer perseverance he was able to eventually locate a vein to serve as the conduit for his poison. Her death, however, was anything but quick and painless as proponents of these so-called euthanizations so often allege.

Instead, she was put through what can only be termed as pure hell which first saw her go into convulsions which were followed by twitching spams. She then began to flail about as she gasped for breath with her tongue hanging out of her diminutive mouth. The Star Press fails to disclose how long this torture session went on but it nevertheless did prove to be too much for the owner's father to watch and he, too, soon marched out of the examining room.

In his defense, Wilson has packed off the blame for this debacle onto the tiny shoulders of totally innocent Sweetpea herself for her refusal to, in the immortal words of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, "go gentle into that good night." "Everybody who deals with cats realizes that cats aren't generally willing participants in some things...," he philosophized to The Star Press. "They don't magically hold still."

While he was at it, he chastised Sweetpea for having been a difficult cat to annihilate. "(During euthanization) cats occasionally...have a reaction period and become excited. It's a well-known fact," he averred to The Star Press. "This was one of the worst excitements I have ever seen."

Her owner likewise did not escape his censure. "I understand people love their cats...but you have to pick them up and get them out of their cage (sic)...," he continued to The Star Press. "This lady was very, very soft-hearted. We got it out of the cage and it screamed."

He finished up by invoking the time-honored scared to death rationale. "I have to protect myself, my employees and my customers...," he declared self-righteously to The Star Press. "If it bites somebody, legally its head has to come off or it has to be quarantined for seven days."

To sum up. Wilson has amateurishly attempted to blame this horribly botched killing upon everyone involved except himself. C'est-à-dire, he is not a cold-blooded murderer, a brute, and an incompetent but rather every bit as innocent as a newborn lamb.

The second complaint concerns an eight-year-old male named Ditty that Wilson whacked under similarly appalling circumstances on July 3, 2017. On that unpleasant occasion, the blundering nitwit jabbed the cat in his back legs with a needle about fifteen times in an unsuccessful effort to locate a vein. Quickly tiring of that futile exercise, he instead stabbed Ditty directly in the heart with the needle without the benefit of first anesthetizing him.

Before that had happened Ditty had screamed his lungs out in a last-ditch plea that his life be spared and in doing so he inadvertently bit his female owner on the nose. That in turn caused a shower of blood to rain down on the killing mat and sent the woman scurrying for cover in the waiting room.

When she returned a short time later the blood now was in her eye and she had malice aforethought in her heart. "Look, just stop. I'll take him home," she reportedly instructed Wilson. "I'll put a bullet in his head. It would be a much kinder way for him to go."

Such reprehensible thinking on the part of owners is neither uncommon nor always attributable to veterinary incompetence. For example, Brian Burgess of Sandyford in Staffordshire took exception to the £141.59 that an unidentified veterinarian charged him for killing off his sixteen-year-old unidentified female on December 16, 2011 after she had suffered a stroke.

"Do I take her home and watch her die in agony, take her down to the canal with a brick around her neck, or simply belt her across the head with a hammer?" the callous cheapskate groused to The Sentinel of Stoke and Staffordshire on January 10, 2012. (See "£141 Put My Pet Cat to Sleep.")

As was the case with Sweetpea, Wilson once again has pinned the blame for this botched liquidation on everyone involved except himself. "This cat was extremely sick and it was not holding still," he complained to The Star Press.

He then trained his sights on Ditty's owner. "The owner was wanting to help hold her (sic) still but she is not trained to do that," he explained to The Star Press. "But sometimes clients insist. What are you going to do, argue with them?"

He is on target, however, in denouncing the owner's alternative plan. "Saying you're going to shoot it with a gun is ridiculous," he told The Star Press. "I did the best I could under the circumstances."

Lastly, he has blamed the difficulty of the task itself. "Sometimes veins are very difficult to get into," he explained to The Star Press. "We (sic) try to avoid intracardiac injections unless they are anesthetized, but this one kept pulling away."

In other words, Ditty richly deserved his all-consuming fear, stress, suffering, a fatal stab wound to the heart and, above all, to be robbed of his right to live. Mercifully, the entire civilized world has not gone completely bonkers.

Wilson has "failed to exercise the reasonable care and diligence ordinarily exercised by members of his profession in similar cases under like circumstances," Hill argues in his complaint to the IBVE. He accordingly is asking it to discipline him by, inter alia, issuing him a letter of reprimand, fining him an unspecified amount, requiring him to go back to veterinary school, placing him on probation, or either suspending or revoking his license.

At least four conclusions can readily be drawn from the murders of Sweetpea and Ditty. First of all, despite the affirmations of Wilson and their owners both cats quite obviously had plenty of life left in them.

Secondly, they clearly did not want to die and that petit fait is graphically demonstrated by the spirited struggles that they waged in order to go on living. Thirdly, there cannot be any disputing that they suffered tremendous physical and psychological pain during their last minutes on this earth. Fourthly, both cats were roughly handled and abused by Wilson and their owners.

Although there are not any data to support a firm conclusion that the way in which Wilson treated Seeetpea and Ditty is the norm in veterinary circles, it is strongly suspected that is indeed the case. The only exception would be those rare instances where cats are already on their last gasps and therefore too far gone in order to put up much in the way of resistance. That in turn makes killing them superfluous.

Lethal injections likewise are not a humane way of killing kittens. On the contrary, newborns are very much alive and correspondingly feel pain very intensely.

What kindhearted and caring owners should do instead is to make ailing cats comfortable at home and to cradle them in their laps. That is anything but a pleasant task but in this world individuals should be willing to accept the tears that follow the laughter, the infirmities of old age that supplant the vigor of youth and, above all, that horrible descent into oblivion that ultimately usurps even life itself.

Cassandra James Pled Guilty to Drug Charges

For their part cats never willingly forsake their owners and the latter should be willing to reciprocate by going the last mile with them. (See Cat Defender post of July 27, 2013 entitled "Instead of Killing Her Off with a Jab of Sodium Pentobarbital and Then Burning Her Corpse, Ian Remains Steadfast at His Guardian's Side Long after Her Death.")

Some of them even hang around to the bitter end with individuals that they hardly even know. (See Cat Defender posts of July 30, 2007 and May 27, 2010 entitled, respectively, "A Visit from Oscar Means That the Grim Reaper Cannot Be Far Behind for the Terminally Ill at a Rhode Island Nursing Home" and "When Lovers, Friends, Health, and All Hope Have Vanished, Oscar Is There for Those Who Have No One and Nothing Left.")

Even the ringing down of the final curtain does not put an end to conscientious owners' obligations to their cats. Rather, the departed must be given a proper memorial service, a fitting burial, and a tombstone. By contrast, veterinarians and shelters simply toss the remains of their victims in the trash.

Cats that still have plenty of life left in them, such as Sweetpea and Ditty, should be allowed to go on living. Furthermore, any halfway just and compassionate society would mandate by law that they be provided with the top-notch veterinary care that they so richly need and deserve regardless of whether their owners can afford it or not.

As reprehensibly as Wilson botched the killings of Sweetpea and Ditty, his conduct in that regard is far from being the worst in recent memory. For example in June of 2011, Mandy Raab of Donnington outside of Telford in Shropshire dropped off her tuxedoes, Maddy and Tammy, at Wrekin Veterinary Practice in nearby Wellington to be sterilized.

While examining Maddy, the practitioners noticed that she had an injured leg and accordingly advised her owner that she should be killed. Given that cats can get along just fine on three appendages, that should have served as a warning to Raab that the surgery was not operating on the level.

It did not, however, and she instead gave the veterinarians the green light to go ahead and kill Maddy. Being incompetent boobs, however, they got the cats mixed up and killed Tammy instead.

Instead of leaving bad enough alone, Raab next instructed the veterinarians to make a tabula rasa of that debacle by polishing off Maddy as originally planned. (See Cat Defender post of July 28, 2011 entitled "Tammy and Maddy Are Forced to Pay the Ultimate Price after Their Owner and an Incompetent Veterinarian Elect to Play Russian Roulette with Their Lives.")

In Wilson's case, this is far from being the first time that he has been called on the carpet by the authorities. For instance, during 2013 and 2014 he wrote multiple prescriptions for Alprazolam (Xanax) allegedly for two dogs, Cujo and Bear, but the drugs were actually used by his then employee and fiancée, thirty-four-year-old Cassandra James.

She later was charged with burglarizing the animal hospital in order to steal additional drugs. Although the authorities originally charged her with five counts of forgery and twenty counts of drug possession, they eventually allowed her to plead guilty to only four counts of possession. The Star Press skirts the issue but it is unlikely that she served any time in jail.

Her boss and lover on the other hand was originally charged with no fewer than twenty-five counts of illegally dealing and dispensing drugs but on January 4th Hill dropped those charges in exchange Wilson's pleading guilty to one count of failing to make, keep, and furnish records of his surgery's controlled substances. Even then he was let off with probation.

"Those charges should never have been filed in the first place," he defiantly told The Star Press. "They didn't have a case."

While he was at it, Hill last summer attempted to get the IBVE to suspend Wilson's license to practice veterinary medicine but he was rebuffed. The state "did not show through clear and convincing evidence that Wilson was a clear and immediate danger to the public health and safety if allowed to continue to practice," it ruled at that time.

Following his guilty plea in January, the IBVE did place him on indefinite probation and order him back to school in order to brush up on his recordkeeping skills. It also mandated that he undergo a veterinarian well-being assessment.

The board's ruling raises two puzzling issues. First of all, since Wilson voluntarily surrendered his Drug Enforcement Administration license to prescribe drugs in 2014 it is difficult to see how that the recordkeeping classes are going to profit either him or the state unless he is planning to have his license reinstated. Secondly, it is hard to imagine how that he is still able to practice veterinary medicine without being able to prescribe drugs to his patients. He accordingly must be relying upon the assistance of another licensed veterinarian to write the prescriptions that he prescribes.

As was the case with his botched liquidations of Sweetpea and Ditty, Wilson is blaming his drug problems on someone else. "The pending criminal charges were related to prescriptions that were improperly obtained by an employee of his practice, who he was also in a romantic relationship with at that time," the IBVE concluded by way of refusing to suspend his license.

About the only thing exculpatory that can be said about that situation is that it is not uncommon for an older man, such as Wilson, to lose his head over a younger woman. It also is far preferable that the dangerous drugs found their way into James' system rather than into Cujo, Bear, and cats.

Furthermore, mood-altering drugs, such as Alprazolam, never should be given to cats, dogs, and other animals under any circumstances. They have their own unique personalities and moods and should be left to them. Those individuals who do not like them as they are should stay away from them and confine their socializing to their doped-up human counterparts.

"Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled," Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his 1879 novel, The Brothers Karamazov. "Don't trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent."

Besides, Alprazolam is an extremely dangerous drug for humans to play around with, let alone animals. For example, its side effects can include paranoia, suicide, memory and coordination impairment, and even death. Nevertheless, the wholesale prescribing of harmful drugs to cats and dogs has become, like whacking them, a popular and profitable sideline for both veterinarians and the drug manufacturers themselves.

While it is not known how big of a racket this is, it nevertheless is strongly suspected that it rivals the medical profession's unconscionable fobbing off of oxycodone and fentanyl to gullible and uninformed members of the public, such as the late rocker Tom Petty who died on October 2nd of last year. (See The New York Times, January 19, 2018, "Tom Petty Died from Accidental Drug Overdose Involving Opiods, Coroner Says.")

Given his tendency to always blame others for his own mistakes, it is only fitting that Wilson now is claiming that Hill and his subordinates are pursuing a vendetta against him. "They got beat (on the drug charges) and are not happy about it, and they're doing everything they can to try and stir up trouble and put me out of business," he railed to The Star Press. "They were searching and searching...They interviewed all of my former employees over the last five years trying to find something. I'm fighting this to the end."

Hill's mouthpiece, Bill McCleery, vociferously disagrees. "The Office of Attorney General Curtis Hill cannot initiate a licensing investigation unless we receive a complaint from outside of the office," he argued to The Star Press. "Legal actions are taken to hold individuals or entities accountable. To suggest that our office would engage in anything but ethical behavior is absurd."

The IBVE is expected to convene a hearing on Hill's complaint against Wilson sometime later this month but it would be shocking if it took any meaningful action against him. After all, considering that it was unwilling to pull his license in spite of his numerous violations of the drug laws, it is not about to do so because of how horribly he mistreated Sweetpea and Ditty.

That is true for at least three reasons. First of all, few individuals either within or outside the veterinary medical profession care so much as one whit about the millions of cats that are systematically exterminated each year across the United States by veterinarians, shelters, Animal Control officers, and cops.

Secondly, killing cats puts an awful lot of money in the coffers of veterinarians. Thirdly, all veterinary oversight bodies, such as the IBVE, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in London, and the Conseil régional de l'ordre des vétérinaires Picardie in Armiens, exist solely in order to protect their own interests and those of their members and that select group most definitely does not include cats. (See Cat Defender posts of June 17, 2010 and January 19, 2012 entitled, respectively, "A Veterinarian Gets Away with Almost Killing Felix but Is Nailed by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for Not Paying Her Dues" and "A Veterinary Watchdog Group Not Only Allows an Incompetent Substitute Practitioner to Get Away with Killing Junior but Scolds His Owner for Complaining.")

It is pretty much impossible to know exactly how many cats that veterinarians kill each year. That is attributable first of all to a total lack of interest on the part of private individuals, rescue groups, and politicians to undertake even so much as a cursory inquiry into the matter.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that veterinarians also hire out their killing expertise to shelters, research laboratories, zoos, circuses, the sports industry, and the entertainment business. For what little it is worth, the Humane Society of the United States in Washington estimates that American animal shelters alone kill three to four million cats and dogs annually and of that total 2.7 million of them are adoptable. Even those deemed to be unadoptable could be sent to TNR colonies and sanctuaries and that in turn strongly implies that one-hundred per cent of all those killings are unnecessary.

Those owners who employ veterinarians, such as Wilson, as their designated triggermen fall into two broad categories. The members of the first group ludicrously claim that they are so hard up as to be totally unable to afford to even purchase food for their cats.

They even have their apologists. "(Owners sometimes just can't) provide what that animal needs due to changes in their family finances or job changes that have caused them to have a tighter budget," Barbara Hutcherson of Lost Dog and Cat Rescue in Arlington, Virginia, averred to USA Today on June 7, 2014. (See "Euthanizing Pets Increasing as Vet Costs Rise.") "The saddest thing that I see in my e-mail inbox is probably when someone needs to give up an older pet that they have had for many years because the care has become so expensive."

That is sans doute some of the most outrageous balderdash ever uttered! Contrary to what she and the capitalist media would have the world to believe, there is not any food shortage in the United States.

The feeding of one or two cats accordingly is well within the budgets of even those that live on welfare. They might have to slack off on their boozing, doping, gambling, whoring, and gluttony but feeding a few cats does not pose a financial hardship on anyone.

Rescue groups even dole out a certain amount of cat food gratis to those owners who are too cheap to spend their own precious shekels on their cats' diet. Even when commercial cat food is not available, their companions can get by just fine on human food. That is precisely what they did until kibble and canned tuna became popular in the 1950's.

It therefore is the epitome of dishonesty to claim that Americans are undernourished; au contraire, they are the world's number one gluttons, not to mention being stingy and wasteful to boot. The federal government spends $79 billion annually on Food Stamps and on top of that there are WIC coupons.

Seemingly every church in the country hands out bags of food, which they obtain from the feds, and there are soup kitchens in practically every neighborhood. For instance, New York City has around four-hundred of them and that does not even begin to take into consideration those groups that hand out food on the street.

Even if worse came to worst dedicated owners could feed their cats by raiding Dumpsters and collecting the boxes of food that are left at the curb on trash collection days. Even individuals who have lost practically everything that they once had nonetheless somehow manage to retain custody of their cats though they may be living on the street in cardboard boxes.

Individuals such as Hannelore Schmedes and Mamoru Demizu have even turned to crime in order to feed their cats. Such expedients almost always prove to be only temporarily successful in that sooner or later the thieves are apprehended by the authorities and their cats once again wind up either going hungry or in direr straits. (See Cat Defender post of February 12, 2011 entitled "A Disabled Former Casino Worker Is Sent to Jail for Shoplifting Food in Order to Feed Her Twelve Cats" and The Telegraph of London, December 12, 2013, "Cat Burglar: Japanese Man Steals £112,000 to Feed His One-Hundred-Twenty Cats.")

There is even a limited amount of veterinary care available to the cats and dogs of the homeless. For example on July 30th of last year, two groups attended to the pets of about sixty individuals who then were living in a shantytown located in the riverbed of the Santa Ana River Trail in Anaheim.

"We launched this program because we know there are many services for homeless people but not for their pets," Mark Malo of the Garden Grove Dog and Cat Hospital told The Orange County Register of Anaheim on July 31, 2017. (See "Veterinarians Treat Homeless Pets at Santa Ana River Trail for Free.") "These people are dedicated to their animals. They would go without their own meals to feed them."

It therefore seems fair to conclude that if the universally despised homeless can find a way to feed their cats and dogs that the so-called respectable bourgeoisie do not have a valid excuse for failing to do likewise. It is a pity, however, that the compassionate work performed by Malo and his colleagues was undone a short time later by the gendarmes who unceremoniously not only evicted the squatters but their pets as well from the Santa Ana River Trail.

Being either unable or unwilling to pay the exorbitant fees that are charged in order to treat ailing cats is likewise not a valid reason for owners to instead pay veterinarians smaller sums to kill them. Nonetheless, that is precisely the course of action chosen by owners with bargain basement moralities.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Theophilus Hill, Jr.

The large number of cats that veterinarians sentence to die on their own by cruelly and inhumanely withholding treatment must also be added to the total that they liquidate for economic reasons. (See Cat Defender posts of March 19, 2014 and July 16, 2010 entitled respectively, "Cheap and Greedy Moral Degenerates at PennVet Extend Their Warmest Christmas Greetings to an Impecunious, but Preeminently Treatable, Cat Via a Jab of Sodium Pentobarbital" and "Tossed Out the Window of a Car Like an Empty Beer Can, Injured Chattanooga Kitten Is Left to Die after at Least Two Veterinarians Refused to Treat It.")

It is not easy to delineate exactly where economic considerations give way to convenience killings, but it is strongly suspected that the latter is even more prevalent than the former. Of course, few owners are willing to call it that; rather, they make up outrageous lies about not wanting to see their cats suffer.

As is the case with economic euthanasia, convenience killing not only has its legions of supporters but many individuals, groups, and institutions who have nothing but praise for veterinarians and shelters who do owners' dirty work for them by whacking their cats. For instance, Karen Brulliard of The Washington Post can hardly manage to put stylo to papier without crying a proverbial river for them. (See Cat Defender post of September 30, 2005 entitled "The Morally Bankrupt Washington Post Pens a Love Letter to Shelter Workers Who Exterminate Cats and Dogs.")

The Austin Chronicle is another publication that is madly in love with cat and dog killers. (See Cat Defender post of November 23, 2005 entitled "A Texas Newspaper Defends Pet Genocide by Publishing Graphic Photographs of Shelter Workers Exterminating a Dog.")

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) does not have anything against convenience euthanizations and, despite toning down its anti-cat rhetoric somewhat in recent years, it still steadfastly refuses to recognize that homeless cats have any right whatsoever to even exist. (See AVMA press release of January 11, 2016, "AVMA Approves Updated Policy on Free-Roaming Abandoned and Feral Cats" and Alley Cat Allies' press release of January 25, 2016, "AVMA Revises 'Free-Roaming Abandoned and Feral Cat' Policy.")

The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association likewise fully supports convenience euthanizations. (See The Canadian Press via the CBC, May 22, 2017, "Advocates Calling to End Euthanization of Healthy Pets for Owners' Convenience.")

This deplorable situation has gotten so far out of hand that there is even an organization, Compassion Understood of Rugby in Warwickshire, that exists to make killing cats "as smooth and stress-free as possible for all concerned." (See Your Cat Magazine of Grantham in Lincolnshire, April 21, 2016, "Online End-of-Life Training for Vet Practices Launched.")

When it comes to not only the prettying-up of the god-awful liquidation of wholesale numbers of cats but also the transforming of doing so into something akin to a social obligation, no one or group can hold so much as a candle to Ingrid E. Newkirk and her band of villains and inveterate liars at PETA. Specifically, she and her brainwashed apostles of death gallivant all over the world and across the Internet preaching the gospel that no homeless cat has any right whatsoever to even exist.

In accordance with such a warped morality, the organization is vehemently opposed to not only TNR but also the feeding of homeless cats by purely private individuals and groups. (See Cat Defender post of August 24, 2017 entitled "The Brutal Murders of a Trio of Atlantic City's Boardwalk Cats Provide an Occasion for the Local Rag and PETA to Whoop It Up and to Break Open the Champagne.")

To merely accuse PETA of simply hating homeless cats would not do justice to its perverted agenda; actually, it hates all cats and is dedicated to their eradication from the face of the earth. To begin with, it wants to make it illegal for individuals to even own them.

"It is time we demand an end to the misguided concept of animal ownership," Newkirk has mouthed on more than one occasion. "(We should) return to a more symbiotic relationship (with animals) -- enjoyment at a distance."

Such an agenda dovetails nicely with the organization's rabid ailurophobia in that if cats no longer had owners to shield and protect them it therefore would have a free hand in order to eliminate them at will. Needless to say, if PETA had its way there soon would no longer be any cats left for anyone to enjoy at any distance.

PETA likewise is opposed to securing homes for abandoned and lost cats. "Adoption can be bad -- far worse than euthanasia," Newkirk insanely claims.

Furthermore, the organization looks down its long, dirty schnoz at no-kill operations. "These people aren't in the trenches, they're on Facebook," the group's Daphne Nachminovitch told Slate on May 19, 2014. (See "Animal Rights Advocates Are Fighting Like Cats and Dogs over No-Kill Shelters.") "They believe that anyone who is compassionate and loves animals can run a shelter, but bad management leads to hoarding, bad adoptions, and cage deaths."

As utterly reprehensible as its rhetoric may be, PETA's praxis is even worse. For instance, it operates a fleet of death vans that travel the back roads of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina trapping and picking up cats and dogs from the streets and fields. It also steals them from the grounds of private residences and even inveigles shelters to surrender them to its representatives under the guise that they are going to find good homes for them.

In reality, none of those animals ever make it out of PETA's death chariots alive; instead, they are administered lethal injections and then their corpses are deposited in private Dumpsters. (See Cat Defender posts of January 29, 2007 and February 9, 2007 entitled, respectively, "PETA's Long History of Killing Cats and Dogs Is Finally Exposed in a North Carolina Courtroom" and "Verdict in PETA Trial: Littering Is a Crime but Not the Mass Slaughter of Innocent Cats and Dogs," plus The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, articles dated December 1, 2014 and February 27, 2015 and entitled, respectively, "Man Says PETA Took His Dog from Porch, Killed Her" and "PETA 'Devastated' after Dog Taken from Porch Is Euthanized.")

Those cats and dogs that somehow manage to make it inside the doors of its shelter in Norfolk do not fare any better in that up to ninety-eight per cent of them are killed shortly after their arrival. Such a policy also conveniently relieves the organization of the necessity of having spend any of the estimated $40 million that it takes in annually on feeding, medicating, sheltering, and adopting out those animals.

All of that, no matter how damning, is old news. Considerably less well understood is PETA's killing modus operandi.

Whereas it is generally conceded by most sensible individuals that killing up to thirty cats at a time in gas chambers, such as shelters in Utah, North Carolina, and other states routinely do, is cruel and barbaric, the time has come to ask just how humane are the lethal injections that PETA touts so vociferously and administers so profusely to innocent and defenseless cats? (See Cat Defender posts of November 12, 2011 and February 7, 2012 entitled, respectively, "The Multiple Attempts Made Upon Andrea's Life Graphically Demonstrate the Urgent Need for an Immediate Ban on the Killing of All Shelter Animals" and "Long-Suffering Andrea Finally Secures a Permanent Home after Incredibly Surviving Quadruple Attempts Made on Her Life by an Unrepentant Utah Shelter.")

"Our service is to provide a peaceful and painless death to animals no one wants," Newkirk has proclaimed on numerous occasions. Since outside observers are not permitted inside PETA's death vans, its Norfolk shelter, and the offices of the veterinarians who do its dirty work for it, no one really know for sure just how "peaceful" and "painless" its executions are in reality.

These egomaniacal frauds also ludicrously claim that cats find being whacked to be a pleasurable experience. "The veterinarian immediately put the suffering cat out of his misery, giving him more comfort in his final moments than he had likely known for much of his life," the organization's Alisa Mullins said in reference to a cat that PETA stole off of the streets and then executed in 2011. (See Cat Defender post of October 7, 2011 entitled "PETA Traps and Kills a Cat and Then Shamelessly Goes Online in Order to Brag about Its Criminal and Foul Deed.")

As the premeditated murders of Sweetpea and Ditty have graphically demonstrated, cats never go willingly to the gallows and that petit fait alone calls into question Newkirk's and Mullins' claims about such killings as "peaceful," "painless," and a "comfort." Even more revealing, Newkirk's own behavior flatly contradicts her own self-serving propaganda.

Before founding PETA, she operated a shelter in Washington, DC, where she did away with her inmates in much the same kind of mad killing frenzies as Robert Fawcett displayed when he liquidated one-hundred of his Siberian Huskies once he no longer needed their services following the close of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. "I went to the front office all the time, and I would say, 'They are stepping on the animals, crushing them like grapes, and they don't care'," she revealed to The New Yorker on April 4, 2003. (See "The Woman Behind the Most Successful Radical Group in America.") "In the end, I would go to work early, before anyone got there, and I would just kill the animals myself. Because I couldn't stand to let them go through that. I must have killed thousands of them, sometimes dozens every day."

To have carried out that many murders each day and in such a short period of time Newkirk must have done to her animals what Wilson did to Ditty and that is to have stabbed each of them in the heart with needles and without the benefit of anesthesia. That accordingly raises the likelihood that PETA conducts business in its death vans and at its shelter in a similar fashion.

It therefore is high time that PETA either put up or shut up. If it truly believes that the thousands of executions that it performs each year are humane it should allow outside observers to witness them.

The deadly drugs that veterinarians and shelters dispense do not only kill cats and dogs but also birds and other wildlife that feed upon their carcasses whenever they are deposited in landfills. Traces of them also have been found in pet food and that strongly suggests that the corpses of cats and dogs are being sold to the manufacturers of pet food.

In that respect, it would be interesting to know how many wild animals that PETA has inadvertently killed through its being too cheap in order to properly dispose of the corpses of the animals that it indiscriminately slaughters en masse each year. It also is entirely conceivable that the lethal drugs employed in these wholesale eradications could be contaminating the earth and streams as well and as such that would make a worthy subject for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington to investigate.

In spite of the wholesale crimes that it commits against cats and dogs, PETA remains a darling of the capitalist media. (See The Virginian-Pilot, February 27, 2015 editorial, "Taking Aim at PETA's Work.")

It also is illustrative to examine how radically different capital offenders, the majority of whom are most assuredly guilty as charged, are treated vis-à-vis totally innocent cats. For instance, the European Union and eighteen American states ban capital punishment and even in the remaining states where it is still legal candlelight vigils are held for the condemned, clerical intervention is common, politicians are called upon to show mercy, and last-minute appeals are made to the United States Supreme Court.

Even on those rare occasions when a condemned man is actually put to death, if he so much as twitches in pain a clarion call goes out from various sectors of society that the death penalty is cruel and immoral. That in turn has led to more than twenty European and American drug manufacturers to prohibit the use of their products in the taking of lives.

"Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve (and) strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment," the Manhattan-based pharmaceutical giant pontificated to The New York Times on May 13, 2016. (See "Pfizer Blocks the Use of Its Drugs in Executions.")

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli brushed aside Pfizer's highfalutin rhetoric in order to zero in on more practical considerations. "A company in the business of helping people is putting its reputation to risk when it supplies drugs for executions," he blowed to The New York Times. "The company is also risking association with botched executions, which opens it up to legal and financial damage."

By contrast, cats have never committed any crimes unless breathing is considered to be a capital offense. Yet, no one has ever seen a candlelight vigil outside of either a shelter or a veterinarian's office, the cats' pleas for mercy fall upon the deaf ears of the Talmud thumpers and Bible beaters, and their inalienable right to live and to be afforded due process of law is not part of the jurisprudence that judges and politicians dispense with such vigor and enthusiasm.

Furthermore as the murders of Sweetpea and Ditty have demonstrated, cats suffer truly horrible and prolonged deaths at the hands of veterinarians and shelter personnel and yet absolutely nobody ever demands that the makers of sodium pentobarbital, such as Akorn Pharmaceuticals and its subsidiary Oak Pharmaceuticals of Lake Forest, Illinois, and Aston Pharma of London, stop selling their products to those practitioners and institutions as well as to all research laboratories located on college campuses. The same scenario holds true for their extensive network of suppliers, such as Henry Schein of Dublin, Ohio, and compounding pharmacies, such as Heiber's of Pittsburgh, who ultimately make it possible for cat killers to not only stay in business but to continue laughing all the way to the bank.

The belief that individuals and institutions are endowed with a carte blanche right to kill cats for any or no reason is embedded so deeply in society that it even has corrupted the thinking and behavior of such renowned rescue groups such as Alley Cat Allies, Cats Protection, and the RSPCA. (See Cat Defender posts of January 2, 2013, February 17, 2016, and October 23, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Alley Cat Allies Demonstrates Its Utter Contempt for the Sanctity of Life by Unconscionably Killing Off Its Office Cat, Jared," "Cats Protection Races to Alfie's Side after His Owner Dies and He Winds Up on the Street, Swears It Is Going to Help Him, and Then Turns Around and Has Him Whacked," and "The RSPCA Steals and Executes Nightshift Who Was His Elderly Caretaker's Last Surviving Link to Her Dead Husband.")

The same holds true for those shelters that claim to be no-kill operations. (See Cat Defender posts of October 23, 2012 and July 29, 2010 entitled, respectively, "A Supposedly No-Kill Operation in Marblehead Betrays Sally and Snuffs Out Her Life Instead of Providing Her with a Home and Veterinary Care" and "The Benicia Vallejo Humane Society Is Outsourcing the Mass Killing of Kittens and Cats All the While Masquerading as as No-Kill Shelter.")

In the final analysis, there is not much point in appealing to veterinarians, shelters, rescue groups, and the drug manufacturers to mend their evil ways; most of them are such shameless whores for shekels that they gladly would pimp for even Satan himself. Politicians, jurists, and the clergy are ever worse rotters.

Together they form a tightly knit club which finds the wholesale suffering and killing of cats to be mutually beneficial. They like things the way they are and are equally determined that they remain unchanged.

What small glimmer of hope that there is lies with owners who have it well within their power to put all of these remorseless killers out of business once and for all time by ceasing to abuse, abandon and, above all, furnish the cats that keep their killing mills grinding. Even so, it would be naïve to think for one moment that the public disclosure of how ruthlessly and unconscionably Sweetpea and Ditty were treated is going to result in many owners having epiphanies.

For instance, the public disclosure of the murder of Spitz at the hands of the Oakland County Animal Shelter in Auburn Hills back in 2015 has not had any positive impact whatsoever upon how owners and shelters treat cats. (See Cat Defender post of July 31, 2015 entitled "The Cold-Blooded Murder of Spitz Once Again Exposes the Horrifying, Ugly, and Utter Appalling Truth about Not Only Shelters but Callous Owners and Phony-Baloney Animal Rights Groups as Well.")

"Human kindness is like a defective tap, the first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries out," novelist Phyllis James once observed. When it comes to man's perennially abysmal mistreatment of cats, however, one can forget about getting anything out of the tap; the problem lies rather in the well itself and it always has been as dry as the Sahara Desert.

Meanwhile, the corruption and misuse of language continues unabated. After all, cats are not being murdered but rather euthanized, put down, put to sleep and, as far as the godly are concerned, gone to heaven.

They likewise do not suffer unimaginable physical and psychological horrors, but rather their deaths are quick, painless, and a welcomed comfort to them. Doubters, should any exist, need only to ask PETA, veterinarians, shelter operators, and the clergy and they will gladly set them straight in a hurry.

Photos: WXIN-TV of Indianapolis (Wilson), The Star Press (James), and WIBC-FM of Indianapolis (Hill).