They Loved Her--So They Mutilated and Tormented Her 60+ Times

Normally, when there's a story about someone's death, and the "mourners" are interviewed and quoted, they don't express their grief by lamenting that before her death, they too didn't get a chance to jab a sharp hook through her face, threaten her with suffocation, and terrify her before tossing her aside for the next person to do the same.

But this AP story published in the New York Times isn't about a human, of course. It's about a 25-year-old "celebrity" carp who lived in a lake in Cambridgeshire, England. She is indeed referred to as "she" rather than "it" in this article--and by the name her so-called admirers gave her, Benson--but that's where acknowledgment of her as an actual living being rather than object of amusement stops.

Benson's big, scaly belly took up most of the Times' front page under the caption: ''Britain's best-loved carp, 1984-2009.'' Benson had been caught and released more than 60 times over the course of her estimated 25 years, and news channels broadcast reels of souvenir shots taken by Benson's captors alongside live interviews with distressed fishermen.

''It was here that everybody came to catch Benson,'' Zoe Whitehead told the BBC from the lakes, about 85 miles (55 miles) north of London. She said she was disappointed to hear of Benson's death, discovered last Tuesday when she was found floating on the water's surface.

''Being the first female to catch Benson would have been fantastic,'' Whitehead said.

Distressed fisherman? How about distressed fish? At least 60 times, this sentient animal was frightfully ripped up out of the water via an excruciating hook piercing her mouth and held up, gasping for breath, so that people could photograph themselves with her as she struggled to live.

But don't worry, she was loved enough that after 25 years of being tormented, she will also now be stuffed and mounted on the wall of the lodge near the lake where she lived, suffered, and died.