Man Charged for Strangling Rat

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-10-16 06:49:00 UTC
Topics:

Well, there's a headline I didn't expect to be writing anytime soon. Nevertheless, it's what a Florida newspaper reported yesterday: "Man Accused in Rat Strangling Charged with Animal Cruelty." In the midst of an oh-so-mature fight with his wife over the last cigarette, the 22-year-old went after the animal: he "grabbed a white rat from their aquarium, smashed its head against the tank and then strangled it to death." (Of course, the article calls the rat "it" and gives us no idea what the gender of the animal actually was.)

I have to admit a bit of surprise here, surprise that he's been charged, that is. The rat this man killed was a feeling, thoughtful being who died a horrible, painful death for no reason at all, and I expect animal advocates to be enraged and saddened at these incidents, but I wouldn't have expected law enforcement to take the rat's death seriously. I would have expected a "just a rat" response. The reason he was charged may have been strategic to keep him in jail or may have been as much about concern for his wife as concern for the animal he killed (as we know, it's common for abuse of nonhuman animals to escalate to abuse of humans and for abusers to go after their victim's companion animals to hurt and control their human victim), but still -- someone was arrested for abusing and cruelly killing a rat, rather than given a "just a rodent pass," and I'll take that.

I'll be interested to learn what happens next -- to see whether or how the charges are followed through on. The local public reaction, I imagine, is mixed, as is the response to the animal cruelty charge in the article's comment thread. Some (including people who've had rat companions) are expressing satisfaction that he was charged, but plenty others are predictably mocking the killing and deriding the charge. It reminds me of the reaction in the comments to the front-page Wall Street Journal article on rats for which I was interviewed in May.

I have two final questions/thoughts after reading the article, one more related to this particular situation than the other: (1) The couple apparently keeps a python as a pet too. Is anybody else wondering if the rat wasn't really a "pet" but was rather a dinner purchased for the python? If so, I question how much emotional distress the woman really must have felt watching her husband strangle the small creature, if the couple regularly watches a giant snake do the same thing to animals they offer up. (I should be clear: I don't think pythons are evil creatures for doing what they must do to survive, but I do have a problem with people selling and buying them as as so-called pets.) And (2) did anyone else think of runt piglets when they read about the man slamming the rat's head against the tank? I wonder how many of the newspaper's readers cringed at that mental image when they read about it over their morning bacon but have no clue that smashing the heads of runt or sick piglets against concrete is an accepted and common way of killing them in the pig-farming industry.

---

Photo by Flickr user maliciousmonkey

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Save the Animals, Save the Planet: Blog Action Day '09, Climate Change
NEXT STORY:
Petitions Delivered Around the World for Release of Indonesian Circus Dolphins

COMMENTS (50)

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.