Teenage Girl Drowns Puppies, Captivates The World

On Monday, August 30th, a teenage girl was filmed throwing six live puppies into a fast moving river.

Let me say that again. A teenage girl was filmed throwing six live puppies into a fast moving river.

No, repeating myself didn’t help. Nor did watching the video. I have a feeling that no amount of information is going to help me process the inhumanity of this teenage girl’s actions, no matter what.

Working in animal rescue, you routinely deal with dogs and cats who have been neglected to the point of death by starvation, who have been beaten bloody or shot or lit on fire or raped. Working in animal rescue, you get used to seeing cruelty.

But there’s just something about this video.

Maybe it’s the fact that the perpetrator is a teenage girl. Someone’s daughter. A high school student, probably. Often, wrongly or rightly, the stories of willful animal abuse (as distinguished from neglect and hoarding situations) feature boys and men as the villains. Or maybe it’s the fact that the perpetrator yelled “whee!” in a gleeful voice as she threw one of the wriggling, crying puppies into the rushing water to drown. Whatever it is, the sickness and horror on display as this saga played out has captivated not only my attention, but the nation’s as well.

From the day the video was uploaded onto YouTube, users of the online community 4chan banded together to try and identify the perpetrator of the savagery, after successfully identifying the woman who dumped a friendly cat she encountered on the street into a trash bin. PETA offered a reward, IDA offered a reward, Rescue Ink offered a reward, and then producer Michael Bay offered an even bigger reward: $50,000 to anyone with information leading to her arrest and prosecution.

And as of Friday, it seems the Bosnian police have found her.

When you break down the events, the sad, sick, terrifying fact is that the girl’s actions were not uncommon. I’ve worked cases where dog breeders threatened to drown non-conformation, "pet quality" puppies if breed rescues didn’t agree to take the unwanted, unsellable puppies into their overburdened, underfunded rescues. I’ve seen shelters where multiple animals, including tiny, day old puppies, are crowded into gas chambers while shelter workers wait for them to suffocate to death. Slowly. And not in Bosnia. In the United States. In North Carolina. Kentucky. Louisiana. Ohio. Dogs and cats and puppies and kittens are being inhumanely executed by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, right here, in our backyards. To say nothing of the unspeakable cruelty perpetrated at America’s factory farms.

Stephanie Feldstein asked why we, as a society, are so fascinated with the “Cat Bin Lady,” and I’m sure the same thought process applies here. Why is this video different from all of the other videos, the other incidents? To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. And I don’t know what to say about the method by which she was identified. A screenshot of the thread in which the perpetrator’s video was initially uploaded on 4chan displays some posts evidencing levels of bigotry, misogyny, and hatred that shocked me into speechlessness.

But I am glad she was found. And I hope for justice.

Photo credit: wsilver