Shock! Horror! Cat is Rubbished!

[PigsnieLite]

Hokay, I know a lot of tender hearted Brits are threatening this craZy woman wid dismemberment & 20 yrs in Guantanamo but if they could summon up 1/10th of the angry energy expended to collect moneys for Pakistan, I would be so much happier. Tsk tsk tsk.

PS. *Outraged* Owners shouldnt haf waited flucking 15 hrs before looking for their cat! Duhhhh.

[PigsnieLite]

... And now for something completely different ... ;D

[Avril]

Aug 24, 2010 19:21:51 GMT -5 PigsnieLite said:

PS. *Outraged* Owners shouldnt haf waited flucking 15 hrs before looking for their cat! Duhhhh.

How do you know they waited fifteen hours before looking? He said they only heard her crying fifteen hours later. We once looked for Teapot for three days only to find her shut in a neigbour's garage when she happened to be crying just as we walked past.

[PigsnieLite]

Well, after reading more about the owners, it doesnt seem to haf been much of a house cat. The cat seems to wander outside most of the time, and then goes into the house to eat when it feels like it. Thats why it wuz 15 hours in the bin, However, I am surprised other people didnt notice the meowing during all that time. The bin wuz right on the sidewalk.

[dragrat]

I like Simon's cat... I've seen this before. Very cute.

[sunfrog]

Wheelie bin!
::Sunfrog checks his yard for hidden cameras.::
I like the cartoon. I dunno if that was animal cruelty. There's food in there and it wasn't hot. I'm thinking that lady was mental. The cat would have escaped when the rubbish man came.

[PigsnieLite]

But whut if it had been rubbish pick up day, and the rubbish man had been wearing earphones -- he wouldnt haf heard the pitiful mewling and the cat would eventually haf been compacted into a cube of garbage! Eeeek!

And then when they interviewed that woman, she said, But its only a cat! so that made even more people mad. Dumb woman.

[Avril]

I don't know about how those wheelie bins are picked up, but they're usually too heavy to be easily picked up by garbage men. They're designed for automated truck pick up.

Our wheelie bins are picked by an enormous single operator truck. The bins are all lined up by obedient residents along the road with their handles towards the road and the hinges of the bin facing the kerb. The truck stops opposite each bin and two long thin automated arms come out and clasp the bin just under the lid. The arms lift the bin up and tip it over towards the opening in the side of the truck, opening the lid and simultaneously emptying the contents into the garbage crusher. Anything alive in the bin wouldn't have a chance to escape before being dumped into the steel jaws of the crusher.

Apart from that, there's little air in those bins, since they are designed to keep out flies and are practically air tight. Any degree of heat would increase inside the plastic bin, similar to how my plastic compost bins trap heat. Any food inside would be rotting or inappropriate for cats.

So, Sunfrog, that is most definitely cruelty. And it's gratuitous. God knows what her parents did to her when she was a baby for her to need to do that to a small animal to get 'a laugh'.

[sunfrog]

They aren't air tight at all. When the can was tipped the cat would have scarperd out as cats do. Besides, have you ever tried to put a cat in a bathtub? It's impossible. I doubt the cat would have gone in the trash truck if it didn't want to.

This story gives new meaning to the words, kitty litter.



Here's the press statement.

Mary Bale, 45, has since said in a statement that her action was out of character and that she regrets doing it.

“I want to take this opportunity to apologise profusely for the upset and distress that my actions have caused,” she said. “I cannot explain why I did this, it is completely out of character and I certainly did not intend to cause any distress to Lola or her owners.”

The four-year-old friendly tabby cat that Mary Bale dumped in the green wheelies bin is called Lola. Explaining what happened yesterday, Bale said:

“I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I was playing with it, stroking it and listening to it purr as it stood on a garden wall. It was very friendly.

“I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me. I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin.”

[Avril]

Aug 25, 2010 13:01:43 GMT -5 sunfrog said:

They aren't air tight at all. When the can was tipped the cat would have scarperd out as cats do. Besides, have you ever tried to put a cat in a bathtub? It's impossible. I doubt the cat would have gone in the trash truck if it didn't want to.

I wonder how you can say any of that with any degree of seriousness. A bathtub is full of water the cat can see. He could use the leverage of a person's arms to jump to the side. There's no comparison to an automated wheelie-bin lifter.

The truck arms raise the bin to a height of about fifteen feet. Then the arms tip it over the opening. The lid doesn't start to open until the bin is tilted at more than 45 degrees. It swings fully open when the bin is vertical and the contents fall straight in. There's nowhere else for the garbage to go but straight into the crusher. Naturally councils don't want garbage to be able to fall anywhere else than into the truck.

Here's a site where you can watch a video - except that these lifters are not truck mounted, and dump the garbage into dumpsters rather than an opening in the top of the side of a closed truck with moving grinders inside.
www.activelifting.com.au/materialsHandling/wheelieBin.htm

So, are you really saying that this wasn't gratuitous, depraved cruelty? Are you saying that it's all okay because the woman apologised? That she didn't know why she did it and that's okay?

[PigsnieLite]

I thinks shes mental. Maybe even in the early stages of dementia! As for *depravity,* this isnt it, Avrilly, as much as you & I love animuls. DEPRAVITY is whut is happening in those Mexicun border towns when policemen are getting dismembered & hung from bridges.

www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/03/dismembered-police-officers.html

[sunfrog]

I don't know if it's cruelty. Nothing bad happened to the cat. It was just bored for 15 hours. If you lock your cat inside your house when you leave for work is that cruelty? What if you don't put food out for it? Your cat is just bored all day. The wheelie bin has food and maybe bugs to play with. The rubbish man didn't compact it. She just bored the cat.

What if you fly to America and you put your cat in a cat carrier with food. Is that cruelty? A 15 hour flight (?) in a confined space. The plane could crash. The cat is just bored.

[Avril]

Depravity is on a continuum and there is actually a scale used by justice systems.

The fact that the cat was saved does not mitigate the depraved intention or lack of care about whether the cat was hurt, trapped, suffering, starved, buried, suffocated, poisoned, or killed by a garbage crusher. What malice might have been going through her mind? The idea that here was another creature she had complete power over, and she did not care.

That's the first premise of depravity.

[PigsnieLite]

How about people who ignore beggars in India or elsewhere? Are they depraved?

[Avril]

There is depraved indifference - when it is possible to prevent suffering or injury and there is no effort to do so.

Depravity is generally a callous act designed to hurt, maim, shame, torture, imprison, psychologically damage, defraud, frame, terrorise or inflict maximum damage on the greatest number, for an unnecessarily long time or in a manner that is unnecessarily cruel when less cruel options are available. Depravity increases in degree where there is premeditation or malice aforethought, and decreases in degree of severity where there is a spontaneous act or reaction that is nevertheless criminal or harmful to others.