Gunned Down by an Assailant Armed with an Air Rifle and Left for Dead in a Field on the Isle of Sheppey, Oak Is Saved at the Last Minute by a Good Samaritan

Oak Spent Eight Hellish Years Living on a Nature Reserve

"If he hadn't been found, that would have been it for him."

-- R.J. Newman

Sheppey is a small island with an area of only thirty-six square miles located off the northern coast of Kent. It is sixty-eight kilometers removed from London and is administratively considered to be part of the borough of Swale.

Access to the mainland for the island's forty thousand residents is pretty much limited to the Kingsferry and Sheppey Crossing bridges. The island's name is derived from the Old English word Sceapig, which not only means sheep island but also furnishes a clue to its distant past.

Today, however, its economy is limited to a dockyard and port in Sheerness, three prisons, various RV sites, and two nature reserves. Considering the sparsity of economical opportunities available, most residents likely earn their daily bread on the mainland.

Based upon all of that, Sheppey would not appear at first glance to be all that hospitable of an environment for any cat who had been cruelly abandoned. Nevertheless, an attractive brown, white, and black tom named Oak was somehow able to have survived under those extremely trying conditions for nearly eight years.

It is theorized that he eked out an extremely meager existence by killing mice and other small animals as well as consuming discarded food. He also likely was fed handouts from time to time by kindhearted residents and tourists.

As far as shelter from the elements, veterinary care, and protection from the machinations of both human and animal predators were concerned, he was completely out of luck. This world can be, and usually is, a rather cruel and heartless affair for homeless cats.

Since cats are unable to swim long distances, he surely was either brought to the island or born there and later abandoned by his despicable owners. Countless other residents likewise turned blind eyes to his interminable suffering.

Like every other corner of England and the world at large, Sheppey breeds hooligans who get their perverted kicks by attacking cats with air guns. As novelist William Golding once observed, "man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that sooner or later one of those low-life scumbags would have trained his air rifle on Oak and his day of reckoning came sometime during the month of March in 2021 when was found motionless, covered in blood, and near death on an unidentified nature reserve. Luckily for him, he was discovered in the nick of time by an unidentified Good Samaritan who either drove him to Cats Protection in Sheerness or telephoned the charity which in turn came and collected him.

The Shrapnel Removed from Oak's Cheek Shattered Several of His Teeth

In spite of that eleventh-hour rescue, Oak was in simply terrible shape and it was touch and go for a while. Specifically, he had been shot in the face which shattered all of the teeth on the left side of his mouth.

Another pellet broke one of his legs. Press reports do not say one way or the other, but it is conceivable that he could have been shot more than twice. Clearly, his assailant wanted to either kill him or, at the very least, to cripple him for life.

"If he hadn't been found, that would have been it for him," sixty-year-old R.J. Newman of Upper St. Ann's Road in Faversham, twenty-seven kilometers west of Sheppey in Kent, and who later adopted Oak told Kent Online on February 10, 2022. (See "Feral Sheppey Cat Shot in Face Finds New Home in Faversham.") 

Although there cannot be any denying that Oak was in desperate need of emergency veterinary care, quite often the absolute worst thing that can happen to any cat, whether it be injured, sickly, or completely healthy, is for it to fall into the clutches of a veterinarian. That is because, with rare exceptions, none of them have any regard whatsoever for the sanctity of feline lives.

Secondly, they fervently believe that if they perform so much as a smidgen of pro bono work that they surely will be struck dead on the spot by a bolt of lightning. Consequently, they pressure aggrieved owners and others into allowing them to kill off their cats for a more modest fee. Administering lethal injections is sans doute quick, easy, and lucrative work and, being every bit as bone-lazy as they are greedy, killing cats in droves suits them every bit as much as a rainy day suits a duck.

Thirdly, most practitioners are by and large grotesquely incompetent and it therefore is not the least bit surprising that erroneous diagnoses are so prevalent. (See Cat Defender posts of September 15, 2017, December 11, 2021, and September 23, 2022 entitled, respectively, "King Loui I's Days of Roaming the Perilous Streets of Aachen Come to a Sad End Shortly after He Is Diagnosed with Inoperable Throat Cancer," "Socks, Coors Field's Most Famous Resident, Is Saved from the Gallows by a Pathology Report after She Is Trapped, Misdiagnosed, and Then Unjustly Consigned to Death Row," and "Domino's Years of Roaming the Campus of the University of Texas Come to a Sad End after He Is Betrayed and Killed Off by the Eggheads Who Were Too Cheap, Lazy, and Heartless to Have Taken Proper Care of Him.")

In Oak's case, the unidentified veterinarian who examined him inexplicably first diagnosed the lump in his cheek to have been a cancerous growth rather than a lead pellet fired from an air rifle. It thus would seem to be the case that some practitioners are overly eager to declare any suspicious growths or bulges in cats to be cancerous as an excuse for collecting a fast and easy fee by promptly killing them off.

That in turn segues into the thought provoking question of why Cats Protection would retain the services of such an obviously incompetent veterinarian? Even more worrisome, if Cats Protection had not been in Oak's corner, it is doubtful that either the Good Samaritan or anybody else would have come forward to have footed the bill for his treatment. Consequently, he would have been killed off on the spot.

Mercifully, saner heads prevailed and the shrapnel was removed from his cheek and his broken leg was surgically repaired and reset. It has not been disclosed what was done about his broken teeth but presumably they were surgically removed.

It accordingly is not known if he is now able to eat regular cat food or only pates. He is however able to get around on his surgically repaired leg but he is still experiencing difficulties.

Mercifully, Oak Is Now Safe and Sound in a Home of His Own

"When no one is looking at him he moves really fast, but he is a little more relaxed now," Newman related to Kent Online. "He runs and leaps like the most athletic cat ever. But when he lands on his arthritic joints, he complains about the pain."

After spending his entire life out of doors, he has been forced into making some adjustments, such as learning not to attempt to jump through glass windows. He additionally has found it all but impossible in order to break certain ingrained habits.

"If he comes across a plastic bag, he will rip it open to see if there is food in it," Newman disclosed to Kent Online. "He has clearly come across human rubbish bags before and scavenged through them."

That is a tough way to live but hopefully those horrible lean days and years are now in his rearview mirror. He has had a difficult life up until now but he somehow persevered.

Most encouraging of all, he now has an owner, a warm and secure home, plenty of food and water, and access to veterinary care whenever he needs it. That is a remarkable turnaround from that god-awful day in March of 2021 when his life came within a hairsbreadth of ending.

His amazing transformation and rebirth is additional proof that even lifelong homeless cats can be not only socialized but also domesticated.  (See Cat Defender post of July 24, 2017 entitled "A Rescue Group in British Columbia Compassionately Elects to Spare Grandpa Mason's Life and in Return for Doing So It Receives an Unexpected Reward Worth More Than Gold Itself.")

It accordingly is long overdue that shelters, Animal Control officers, and veterinarians were held accountable under the anti-cruelty statutes for using homelessness as a pretext for exterminating en masse those cats that do not have owners.

A per usual, no arrest was ever made in Oak's near-fatal wounding. Moreover, it is extremely doubtful that either Cats Protection or the police even so much as bothered to have opened investigations into the matter.

That is all the more deplorable in that similar attacks on cats appear to be rather common in the area. Par exemple, on December 6, 2018 a pretty tuxedo subsequently dubbed Angel was found by another Good Samaritan on Church Road in Throwley, a town of three-hundred residents located eight kilometers south of Favershan, with a ball bearing embedded in the bridge of her nose.

Although the projectile tore loose tiny fragments from her skull, it is not believed to have inflicted any long-term damage. That totally improbable stroke of good luck possibly could have been attributable to the fact that it is believed that the projectile was fired from a catapult as opposed to a gun, the latter of which easily could have killed her.

Angel Was Shot Between the Eyes with a Ball Bearing but Lived

"This could have been fatal for Angel but miraculously it is looking like she will pull through her ordeal," Grace Harris-Bridge of the RSPCA told the BBC on December 12, 2018. (See "Cat Shot in Face Point-Blank Range Near Faversham.")

Even though she went on to term the attack as "callous and cruel," apparently neither she nor anyone else connected to the RSPCA even bothered to search for Angel's assailant. Since she was neither microchipped nor collared, she was transferred to the charity's shelter in Canterbury, twenty-two kilometers east of Throwley, where an uncertain fate awaited her.

Shooting cats in the face with air guns with the intention of either blinding or killing them is a cruel sport that has attracted a diverse group of enthusiasts. Most prominently, both ornithologists and gardeners revel in it. (See Cat Defender posts of March 9, 2012 and March 13, 2012 entitled, respectively, "An Amateur Ornithologist Guns Down Hartley with an Air Rifle, Feigns Remorse, and Then Cheats Justice by Begging and Lying" and "The Sick Wife Defense Works Like a Charm for Cunning Patrick Doyle after He Traps a Cat and Then Shoots It With an Air Rifle while Still in Its Cage.") 

Whereas those cretins are motivated by a inveterate hatred of both cats and their supporters, juvenile delinquents who maim and kill cats for the sheer joy of doing so are believed to comprise the largest contingent of individuals who commit these types of crimes. (See Cat Defender posts of May 7, 2007, September 27, 2020, and April 2, 2015 entitled, respectively, "British Punks Are Having a Field Day Maiming Cats with Air Guns but the Peelers Continue to Look the Other Way," "Caged, Shot Thirty Times with an Air Gun, and Then Tossed in the Bay to Drown, Lovey Is Rescued in the Middle of the Night by a Good Samaritan," and "A Cornishman Shells Out £10,000 on Private Peepers in Order to Track Down Farah's Killer but Once Again Gets Stiffed by Both the Police and the RSPCA," plus the Bournemouth Echo, February 16, 2017, "Cat Which Survived Three Air Gun Attacks Is Killed after Fourth Shooting.") 

Only recently on September 13th, a seven-month-old ginger and white kitten was shot in the neck by an assailant with an air rifle on Springfield Road in Hemel Hempstead, one-hundred-thirty-six kilometers northeast of Faversham, in Hertfordshire.

A week later on September 20th, a black cat lost a leg to, most likely, the same monster on the same road. Both woundings so far have proven insufficient, however, to get any enforcement action out of the Hertfordshire Police other than their usual nonsensical jawboning.

"This is a really traumatic time for the owners and their beloved pets and investigations are continuing to establish how they became injured," Police Constable Max Robinson told the BBC on October 11th.  (See "Two Cats Injured by Air Gun Pellets.")

Au contraire, there is little doubt as to what is going on: some cretin is being allowed to maim cats with impunity. The only pertinent question is what, if anything, do Robinson and the Hertfordshire Police plan on doing about it?

The arsenal of lethal weapons available to would-be feline attackers is by no means limited to air guns but it also extends, as Angel found out, to the use of ball bearing guns and in that light she was by no means the first victim of assailants armed with these weapons. (See Cat Defender post of July 19, 2010 entitled "Molly Loses an Eye to an Assailant with a Ball Bearing Gun Only Later to Be Victimized by an Incompetent Veterinarian.")

The Ball Bearing Removed from Angel's Nose Easily Could Have Killed Her

Some of these cat-haters even have resorted to using nail guns in order to blind cats. (See Cat Defender posts of June 1, 2010 and July 6, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Grace Survives Being Shot Point-Blank Between the Eyes by a Monster with a Nail Gun but the Authorities in Sioux City Refuse to Even Investigate the Attack" and "Grace Is Out of the Hospital and Has a New Home but Her Nail Gun Assailant Remains as Free as a Bird Thanks to the Authorities' Dereliction of Duty.") 

Others use crossbows in order to rob cats of their sight. (See Cat Defender posts of June 1, 2009 and March 5, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Blind and Deaf on Her Left Side as the Result of a Bow and Arrow Attack by a Juvenile Miscreant, Valentine Is Looking for a Permanent Home" and "Struck Down by an Archer and Shunned by an Uncaring Public for More Than a Year, Valentine Finally Finds a Home.")

For those criminals who are able to get their hands on them, pistols and rifles are another proficient means of blinding and killing cats. (See Tag24 of Dresden, articles dated September 23, 2021 and May 21, 2022 and entitled, respectively, "Kater mit Schrotkugeln getötet, wahrend Besitzer im Urlaub waren" and "Dreitausend Euro Strafe! Jäger erschoss Katze, weil sie an seine Hauswand Pinkelte.")

When none of those diabolical weapons are readily available, aulirophobes can always fall back upon using plain old-fashioned rocks in order to put out cats' eyes. (See Cat Defender post of April 16, 2015 entitled "Nelson's Odyssey from Being the Long Abused Cat That Nobody Wanted to One of England's Most Beloved Comes to a Sad End at Age Twenty.")

Considering that life is already difficult enough for sighted cats, blinding them only makes their lives all that much more hellish. In addition to all of the pain and suffering inflicted upon them, not only is medicating them expensive but their newly acquired handicaps make it much more difficult in order to find homes for them.

Individuals who commit these types of reprehensible crimes, whether they be juveniles or adults, should not under any circumstances be shown any mercy whatsoever by either societies or the courts. Yet,  that is all that any of them ever receive from cops, prosecutors, and jurists.

In order for justice to prevail, individuals who blind cats should lose one of their eyes. Likewise, those who kill cats should in turn be executed by the state.

The limeys and the yanks do not want any part of such thinking but putting an end to cruelty to cats and all animals should be everybody's business. Anna Sewell summed up the matter as follows in her 1877 novel, Black Beauty:

"'Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?' a gentleman named Wright asked.

"'No,' said his companion.

"'Then I'll tell you. It's because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrongdoer to light. I never see a wicked thing like this without doing what I can, and many a master has thanked me for letting him know how his horses have been used.

"'My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt'."

Photos: R.J. Newman (Oak and shrapnel) and the RSPCA (Angel and the ball bearing removed from her nose).

A Much Ballyhooed New Law Produces the Same Old Perverted Justice as Cardiff Crown Court Allows Tristian Paul Pearson to Get Away Scot-Free with Poisoning to Death Bailey and Luna with Antifreeze

Bailey Did Not Deserve Such a Cruel Ending to His Young Life

"It's good to see the courts applying the new legislation in a way it was intended."
-- Hayley Firman of the RSPCA

Bailey was a gorgeous light-tan Persian of undetermined age while Luna was a pretty tuxedo, also of unknown age but possibly still a kitten. They lived with their respective owners, an unidentified father and his daughter and her three children, ages eight, five, and eighteen months, in separate houses in Bargoed, a crime-ridden former coal mining town of twelve-thousand inhabitants in Caerphilly County in southern Wales.

Press reports neglect to mention if either of them had been mistreated in the past but all of that changed for the absolute worst imaginable on September 3rd of last year when Bailey staggered home weak and wobbly-legged and subsequently died. Luna staggered home a few days later and was rushed to a veterinarian who determined that she was suffering from kidney failure.

That practitioner killed her off on September 7th but it is not known if that precipitate action was taken in the name of expediency and just to save money or if she truly was beyond all mortal assistance. While the practitioner was examining her, that individual also determined that she had been killed by antifreeze.

"One cat died before he could even be taken to the vets, while another one had to be put to sleep to prevent suffering," Simon Evans of the RSPCA opined to The Mirror of London on August 10, 2022. (See "Man Fed Neighbours' Cats Poisoned Tuna Causing Two (sic) Animals to Have to Be Put Down.") "Vets found clear evidence of the harm the ethylene glycol had done."

Although the poisonous chemical is used in air conditioning units, brake fluid, solar panels, and color film processing, it is more commonly found in antifreeze. Therefore, immediately suspecting foul play but being astute enough to realize that when it comes to investigating crimes perpetrated against cats that both the RSPCA and coppers are completely worthless, the father and daughter took it upon themselves to find the culprit.

As it soon turned out, they did not have either far to go or long to look. While peering into the rear garden of their nearby neighbor, forty-four-year-old Tristian Paul Pearson of West Street, they spied two trays, one of which contained a bright blue liquid while the other one contained more of the same substance as well as tuna.

Somehow or other they managed to retrieve the two trays and to pass them along to the RSPCA which determined that both of them contained antifreeze. Additional poisoned tuna also was found scattered in Luna's garden.

"These poor cats were deliberately tempted into digesting a substance that is incredibly dangerous for cats and ultimately proved fatal to them both," Evans told the Daily Mail of London on August 10, 2022. (See "Man, Forty-Four, Who Targeted and Poisoned His Neighbours' Cats Is Handed Suspended Jail Term in Landmark Case.")  "The two dishes found in the defendant's garden contained a high concentration of the dangerous substance -- and he admitted in court that he caused them to consume it, causing them to suffer unnecessarily."

There certainly cannot be any doubt whatsoever that Bailey and Luna suffered mightily in that in addition to irreversible kidney damage, antifreeze is known to cause, inter alia, difficulties in breathing and walking, seizures, lethargy, vomiting, a loss of appetite, nausea, thirst, an inability to urinate, and comas. It also is so potent that as little as 1.5 milliliters per kilogram of body weight (a teaspoon) is more than sufficient in order to kill a seven-pound cat.

Symptoms of antifreeze poisoning can develop anywhere from thirty minutes to twelve hours after it has been ingested. Worst of all, treatment is pretty much limited to using hydrogen peroxide to induce vomiting, stomach pumping, activated charcoal to bind the antifreeze in the digestive tract, intravenous fluids to help alleviate dehydration, sodium bicarbonate for acidosis, a twenty per cent solution of ethyl alcohol to inhibit the breakdown of the poison, drugs to treat kidney failure, the diuretic Furosemide, the vessel-dilating drug Dopamine to promote urination, and peritoneal dialysis.

At the end of the day, however, none of those measures are all that effective in that it is estimated that more than eighty per cent of those cats that suffer kidney failure die in spite of receiving treatment. (See PetPlace.com, December 10, 2014, "Ethylene Glycol Toxicosis in Cats.")

Clearly, deliberately poisoning cats with antifreeze is every bit as ruthless, nasty, and cowardly as doing so with acetaminophen, which is precisely what Ted Williams of the National Audubon Society (NAS) proposed in 2013. (See Cat Defender post of May 18, 2013 entitled "Ted Williams and the National Audubon Society Issue a Call for Cats to be Poisoned with Tylenol® and Then Try to Lie Out of It.")

Even though there is not any way that Bailey's and Luna's suffering can be underestimated, it is nothing short of insane for Evans to focus on that rather than the fact that Pearson took away their precious lives every bit as surely as if he had taken a pistol and shot them in the head. In doing so, he also inflicted incalculable pain, suffering, and psychological damage on their owners and their children and grandchildren that likely never will completely heal.

Since as per usual the slipshod English media have failed to broach the subject of any prior trouble between the cats and Pearson, it would appear that he struck like an assassin in the night. On the one hand, his cunning makes him an especially dangerous individual along the same lines as Williams and the NAS.

On the other hand, his failure to have gotten rid of the evidence exposes him as an individual who believes himself to be beyond the reach of the law as well as the retribution of Bailey's and Luna's outraged owners. Criminals who do not have any respect for life while simultaneously believing that they are above all law and morality can only be dealt with through either force or permanent incarceration.

Given that the aggrieved owners had not only tracked down Pearson but, even more importantly, gotten the goods on him, the normally totally worthless stiffs at the RSPCA tardily decided that they, too, ought to contribute something to this investigation and they did so by commissioning an expert veterinary witness report that concluded it was "very highly likely that this (the confiscated trays) was the source of the ethylene glycol that caused the death(s) of'" Bailey and Luna.

When confronted with the evidence against him, Pearson pled guilty to killing the cats in Cwmbran Magistrates' Court, twenty-six kilometers west of Bargoed, at some undisclosed date within the past year. In one of the idiosyncrasies of the English judicial system, his case was referred to Cardiff Crown Court, twenty-nine kilometers south of Bargoed, for sentencing.

That took place on August 5th of this year and nobody was half as pleased with the outcome as the defendant himself. Despite the irremediable damage that he had done to Bailey, Luna, and their caretakers, the unidentified presiding judge let him off with an eight-month suspended jail sentence.

That stench-of-the-bench did order Pearson to perform one-hundred-fifty hours of community service as well as to pay a £154 surcharge and £2,000 in court costs but those superfluous additions are almost too trivial to even mention. Clearly, English justice is not only slow but the laughingstock of the civilized world to boot.

In keeping with its customary response every time that it loses in court, the RSPCA not only stubbornly refused to admit defeat but ludicrously claimed victory instead. "We hope this shocking, landmark case sends a clear message to anyone thinking of targeting cats in this way," Evans blew to the Daily Mail. "This is wrong, illegal and will not be tolerated."

Luna's Days of Playing, Loving, and Being Loved Ended Horribly 

His boss, Hayley Firman, wasted little time in demonstrating that when it comes to telling whoppers she was not about to be bested by anyone, especially a subordinate. "It's good to see the courts applying the new legislation in a way it was intended," she pontificated to The Mirror.

The "new legislation" referred to by Firman is the Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Act of 2021 whereas the "landmark case" mentioned by Evans is this one which is believed to have been the first one tried under the new law. Without going into the nuances of the law itself, suffice it to say that it allows cases of animal cruelty to be tried in both magisterial (minor summary offenses) and crown courts (major offenses tried before a judge and jury) while at the same time, supposedly, increasing the maximum penalty from six months to five years in jail.

Theoretically at least, there are no longer any limitations on fines. Whereas all of that may sound impressive, the outcome in this case demonstrates conclusively that absolutely nothing has changed in either England or Wales, where the new law applies, or in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the once mighty empire's dwindling number of overseas' territories, where it does not apply.

The RSPCA therefore can tell its outrageous lies until doomsday but even it cannot alter the fact that Pearson hideously murdered Bailey and Luna and that the courts have allowed him to get away scot-free with doing so. His utterly worthless life will go on for perhaps as long as another fifty years but Bailey's and Luna's are over and at a tender age. 

Every bit as disturbing, Bailey and Luna are unlikely to have been the first cats that he has poisoned and they surely will not be the last. In fact, he more than likely is laughing off his rotten and diseased ass this very moment at the abysmal stupidity of both the sentencing judge and the RSPCA.

English jurists and the RSPCA are, however, far from being the only robed ailurophobes in this world.  Au contraire, the same cruel charade is played out on a daily basis in countless courtrooms and legislative chambers all across the United States.

For example, legislators in Harrisburg supposedly strengthened Pennsylvania's anti-cruelty statutes in 2017 but, as best it could be determined, nothing has changed in the way that the state's legal system deals with feline abusers and killers. (See Cat Defender post of March 18, 2022 entitled "Two Drivers for the United States Postal Service Deliberately Run Over Four Cats in New Galilee but They Are Allowed to Escape Justice and to Keep Their Jobs.")

Last year, legislators in Nashville also passed a bill that was supposed to have gotten tough with animal abusers and killers in Tennessee but nothing has changed. (See Cat Defender posts of June 4, 2021 and November 12, 2021 entitled, respectively, "A Beautiful Yellow and White Cat Is Brutally Slain and Then Put on Display in the Parking Lot of a Funeral Home in Johnson City but Absolutely Nobody Cares about Apprehending Its Killer, Least of All the Utterly Worthless Local Police" and "Deamion Robert Davis Is at Long Last Arrested for Brutally Killing a Cat in the Parking Lot of a Funeral Home in Johnson City That Earlier Had Been Stolen and Given to Him on Craigslist.")

The problem is so simple that even a small child could readily grasp the basics of it. First of all, in order to make any progress in the eternal fight against cat abusers, somebody must be willing to investigate these types of crimes.

Cops certainly are not about to do so and neither are phony-baloney animal welfare protection groups such as the RSPCA. That is even more so the case with antifreeze in that using it in order to kill cats has become the perfect crime.

For example, at least twenty-two cats were poisoned with the deadly substance in Calverton, Nottinghamshire, in 2014 but no arrests were ever made. (See the BBC, December 3, 2014, "Antifreeze Cat Deaths: Minister Rejects Idea to Stop Poisonings.") 

In Kessingland in Suffolk, three cats belonging to Andy Pollard of Francis Road were poisoned to death in recent years with antifreeze. Felix, a six-year-old tuxedo died on December 10, 2020.

Ethel, a black, eighteen-month-old female, died six weeks later while Tabitha, a four-year-old brown female with streaks of black, was poisoned to death four days later. (See the BBC, February 12, 2021, "Cat Deaths in Suffolk Linked to 'Antifreeze' Poisoning.") 

These types of unconscionable poisonings are so widespread that Cats Protection of Haywards Heath in Sussex received one-thousand, one-hundred-ninety-seven such reports between November of 2012 and December of 2014. Even so, that staggering number of poisonings, both lethal and nonlethal, proved insufficient in order to get any enforcement action out of the RSPCA, the parliamentarians, and the cops.

The situation in the land of the dollar bill is every bit as deplorable. For instance, one cat was poisoned to death with antifreeze while another ten went missing and were presumed to have been poisoned to death in San Francisco back in 2007. All of them belonged to a managed colony in the Excelsior District in the southeastern part of the city.

One of their caretakers, Lana Bajsel of Give Me Shelter Cat Rescue, identified a likely suspect and passed that information along to Vicky Guldbeck of Animal Control but she confined her efforts to knocking on the suspect's door. When he refused to answer, she inexcusably threw in the towel and dropped the investigation.

Even more reprehensibly, during her previous twenty-three years on the job she never once had convicted anybody of killing a cat. Clearly, a no-account bum like her never should have been hired in the first place. (See Cat Defender post of July 2, 2007 republished on April 1, 2020 and entitled "Cats Are Being Poisoned with Antifreeze in San Francisco but Animal Control Refuses to Take the Killings Seriously.")

In the face of the authorities' gross dereliction of duty, that leaves the herculean task of investigating crimes perpetrated against cats in the hands of the managers of TNR colonies and aggrieved owners, such as Bailey's and Luna's. Even when they are successful in tracking down abusers and killers, they most of the time still come away empty-handed because the cops, RSPCA, and other groups still not only categorically refuse to examine the evidence that has been presented to them free of charge and on silver platters. (See Cat Defender posts of April 2, 2015 and December 18, 2018 entitled, respectively, "A Cornishman Shells Out £10,000 on Private Peepers in Order to Track Down Farah's Killer but Once Again Gets Stiffed by Both the Police and RSPCA" and "The Brutal Attackers of Mr. Solly Walk in a Lark All Because the Rotters at Scotland Yard Were Too Bone-Lazy, Derelict, and Ailirophobic to Even Examine the Evidence Supplied Them by His Distraught Owner," plus the Daily Mail, November 25, 2021, "Has the Croydon Cat Killer Returned?" and Inside Croydon, October 14, 2021, "Serious Concerns That 'Croydon Cat Killer' May Have Returned.")

The intransigence of prosecutors is another huge obstacle that must be overcome if there is ever going to be so much as a smidgen of justice for murdered cats and their aggrieved owners. Specifically, even when evidence of an accused killer's guilt reaches their desks, instead of prosecuting such defendants they instead plea bargain felony animal cruelty charges down to misdemeanors and that in turn invariably allows the obviously guilty to escape punishment with minuscule fines.

Even on those truly rare occasions when cat killers are actually put on trial and convictions secured, defendants ultimately are set scot-free by jurists who stubbornly refuse to apply the law by punishing them. Furthermore, although the judges who sit on crown courts have considerably more sentencing authority than do their colleagues who preside over magisterial courts, in this particular instance that made absolutely no difference in the outcome.

Even more disgracefully, the legislators who draft the anti-cruelty statutes are acutely aware of these insurmountable problems but yet they intentionally choose not to remedy them. It thus seems fair to conclude that it is  strictly a matter of beau geste  with politicians of all stripes when it comes to enforcing the anti-cruelty statutes. Most shameful of all, individuals and groups who claim to care so much about animals unfailingly vote to reelect year after year the same sheriffs, prosecutors, judges, and legislators who are condoning the abuse and killing of cats.

The Antifreeze and Poisoned Tuna Used to Kill Bailey and Luna

In addition to its reluctance to investigate cases of cruelty to cats and, even when it does, to invariably lose in court, the RSPCA is pretty much a complete failure on all other levels as an animal protection organization. Most prominently, instead of placing cats in good homes, it exterminates an estimated fifty to seventy-five per cent of those that it impounds. (See the Daily Mail, December 30, 2012, "Revealed: RSPCA Destroys Half of the Animals That It Rescues -- Yet Thousands Are Completely Healthy.")

Secondly, it steals domesticated cats off the street and then executes them without even attempting to reunite them with their owners. (See Cat Defender posts of June 5, 2007 and October 23, 2010 entitled, respectively, "The RSPCA's Unlawful Seizure and Senseless Killing of Mork Leaves His Sister, Mindy, Brokenhearted and His Caretakers Devastated" and "The RSPCA Steals and Executes Nightshift Who Was His Elderly Caretaker's Last Surviving Link to Her Dead Husband.")

Thirdly, it even kills some of the cats that it has rescued and promised the public that it would treat and nurse back to health. For instance, that is precisely what it did to a handsome black Siamese named Rupert from Cambridge in 2013 and a pretty nameless gray and white female from Colchester who had been badly beaten about the face in 2015. (See the Cambridge News, March 2, 2013, "Cat Suffers Chemical Burns after Poisoning" and Cat Defender post of August 31, 2015 entitled "Beaten and Entombed Above Ground for Several Weeks, a Forever Nameless Cat from Colchester Is Finished Off by the RSPCA which Refuses to Even Investigate Her Death.")

Fourthly, of all of its myriad of failures as an animal protection agency, it is arguably the line of bull that the RSPCA shoots the public every time that it loses in court that is the most irksome. Furthermore, its odious verbal sleight of hand certainly did not begin with its allowing of Pearson to get away with poisoning to death Bailey and Luna.

For example, on August 8, 2011 sixty-eight-year-old amateur ornithologist Eric Reeves of Bradenham Hall Cottages in Bradenham, near Dereham, in Norfolk went out and purchased an air rifle in order to shoot to death a five-month-old brown and white kitten named Hartley that his neighbor, Nicholas Townley, had only adopted in July. When the case came to trial on October 26,2011 in King's Lynn Magistrates' Court, the presiding judge let him off with £400 in court costs and one-hundred hours of community service.

Yet, the RSPCA ludicrously attempted to sell the public a bill of goods that justice had prevailed. "This sends a clear message that it is unacceptable to go around shooting animals," the organization's Dave Padmore caroled after sentencing. "The RSPCA will continue to investigate incidents of this nature and where possible will always seek to bring a prosecution."

On the contrary, it is highly doubtful that Reeves has mended his cat-killing ways. (See Cat Defender post of March 9, 2012 entitled "An Amateur Ornithologist Guns Down Hartley with an Air Rifle, Feigns Remorse, and Then Cheats Justice by Begging and Lying.")

A little over a year later, the RSPCA was given an opportunity to redeem itself but instead it once again made an utter fool of itself. This time around the culprit was seventy-one-year-old Patrick Doyle of Fields Road in the village of Wootton in Bedford, Bedfordshire, who on July 16, 2011 baited a trap with fish and then camouflaged it in his garden.

A forever nameless black cat unwittingly stumbled into it whereupon Doyle immediately shot it point-blank in the face with an air rifle from a distance of two feet. Fortunately Doyle's neighbor, Caroline Benbow-Hunt, intervened, released the cat, and notified the RSPCA.

When the case came to trial on February 29, 2012 in Bedford Magistrates' Court, Doyle was predictably let off with £1,311.64 in court costs. That extremely light tap on the wrists, however, suited the RSPCA just fine.

"This was a deliberate act of cruelty against an innocent animal and we are satisfied with the sentence handed out today," the organization's Dave Braybroke stated afterwards. "We hope this case acts as a deterrent and sends a clear message that acts of cruelty like this will not be accepted and the RSPCA will investigate and prosecute offenders. It is shocking to think that someone deliberately set up a cat trap with the intention of snaring a cat and then shot it."

Most unforgivable of all, the RSPCA did not even bother to search for the injured cat which possibly could have been saved. As things eventually turned out, it never again was spotted in the neighborhood and is presumed to have died from the pellet or, more likely, pellets, fired at it by the supremely evil Doyle. (See Cat Defender post of March 13, 2012 entitled "The Sick Wife Defense Works Like a Charm for Cunning Patrick Doyle after He Traps a Cat and Then Shoots It with an Air Rifle While Still in Its Cage.")

The tie that binds all of these outrageously unjust court rulings together is a profound disrespect for the sanctity of all feline life and a disregard for the anti-cruelty statutes. To put the matter another way, individuals and cat-hating organizations, such as the NAS, commit their dastardly crimes because they fully realize that they have the law enforcement community and the courts in their hip pockets.

"(The day will come when) all the forms of life...will stand before the court -- the pileated woodpecker as well as the coyotes and bears, the lemmings as well as the trout in the streams," Bill Douglas predicted in his famous 1972 dissent in Sierra Club v Morton, 405 U.S 727. That certainly has not come to fruition; in fact, the mistreatment of animals and Mother Earth has increased exponentially over the course of the past fifty years.

In particular, the abject failure of the citizens and rulers in England and Wales to enforce the anti-cruelty statutes by severely punishing cat abusers and killers has cost Bailey and Luna their lives and left their owners devastated. Perhaps even worse, the asinine conduct of the RSPCA and, above all, Cardiff Crown Court, can only be interpreted as sending a green light to Pearson and all poisoners to continue killing cats with impunity.

Additionally, there is not anything in press reports that would tend to indicate that the court even bothered to take into consideration the feelings, needs, and rights of Bailey, Luna, and their owners. All that concerned the sentencing judge was saving Pearson's rotten hide.

Should anybody in either Wales or England ever be interested in learning how that a real judge imbued with an abiding respect for justice behaves, he or she need not look any further than to K. Michael Kirkman of the Superior Court of San Diego County who on September 17, 2007 sentenced Robert Eugene Brunner, then forty-seven-years-old, of the nearby suburb of Vista to three years in jail and fined him US$2,500 for his hideous murder with a bow and arrow of a three-year-old, orange-colored cat named Bill that belonged to his next-door neighbor, Janien Bubien. He did not stop there, however, but he also ordered Brunner to pay her an additional US$5,000 so that she could relocate elsewhere. (See Cat Defender posts of August 14, 2007 and September 24, 2007 entitled, respectively, "A Grieving Widow Seeks Justice for Her Beloved Orange-Colored Tom, Bill, Who Was Hunted Down and Savagely Killed with a Bow and Arrow" and "A California Man Who Slew His Neighbor's Cat, Bill, with a Bow and Arrow Is Sentenced to Three Years in Jail.")

In the case of Bailey and Luna, neither of them received so much as an ounce of justice from the courts. Almost as bad, their owners are likely trapped in their respective houses for the remainder of their lives and that means that they are going to be forced to look at Pearson's ugly face and to watch him preen and strut around their neighborhood until the day that they die.

C'est-à-dire, with him living next door to them, they never will be able to escape either him or the horrifying memory of what he did to them and their cats. He accordingly not only has destroyed their lives but also those of their children and grandchildren as well.

That is not justice; au contraire, it is an abomination of it. Punishing Pearson would not have brought back Bailey and Luna but it would have demonstrated that their lives mattered and it just might have prompted other would-be cat killers to think twice before committing their dastardly crimes.

All of those considerations pale in comparison with the tragic reality that Bailey and Luna are gone forever and now live on only in photographs and the memories of their inconsolable owners. What a terrible waste of two young and beautiful cats whose precious lives were worth infinitely more than those of Pearson, the sentencing judge, the members of the RSPCA, and the good-for-nothing legislators in the House of Commons.

Photos: the RSPCA