Rewards offered to find seal killers
According to this year's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) List of Shame, in June two Kaikoura youths were accused of bludgeoning to death an adult seal and a pup from what was presumably the same colony. Police investigating this earlier incident said a metal pole was used, and that one of the seals was afterwards run over by a vehicle.
Past SPCA Lists of Shame have noted similar attacks on other, particular groups of animals, including: the mutilation and dismemberment of cows; random stabbings and the setting alight of live, roadside goats; the evisceration of live sheep; the deliberate poisoning of numbers of wild and captive birds; and the severing of paws, ears, genitals and tails from dogs, cats and kittens.
Growing numbers of sadistic attacks have begun to worry experts from several spheres, not just those concerned with animal welfare. The noted increase helped prompt legislators to pass the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill earlier this year. A Ministry of Agriculture spokesman commented that the rise of animal cruelty was horrifying many New Zealanders.
The trend has also brought about collaboration between New Zealand Police, SPCA, and Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS), in an initiative called First Strike. First Strike was facilitated by an organisation seeking to raise awareness of the proven connection between violence against animals and violence against humans.
Member Catriona Maclennan states the campaign's motto: "The first strike against an animal may be the first strike in a lifetime of violence".
The connection has been known in the United States for decades. One study of 57 New Jersey families treated by Youth and Family services found that in 88% of cases where children were being abused, animals were abused as well.
Retrospective studies of jailed, seriously-violent offenders, have also demonstrated clear correlations between the sadistic mistreatment of animals and violent, criminal socio-pathology.
Bob Kerridge, a chief executive of the SPCA in Auckland, claimed in a Listener article in February, 2005 that animals were often abused in order to hurt a partner or child. Mr Kerridge also warned that young people were often violent towards animals in order to make a point to their elders or to society.
This was illustrated, along with the already proven link between domestic abuse and animal cruelty, in November 2008, when a 14-year-old from Tauranga, a known victim of terrible abuse from his own parents, mutilated a cat and hung it from a street sign.
But Mr Kerridge believed the problem was largely attitudinal.
Again he seemed bang on when an organised dog-fighting circuit was exposed in the Bay of Plenty in 2006. SPCA inspector Jim Boyd, who helped uncover the underground blood sport and bring about the successful prosecution of a gang-connected dog breeder, was interviewed in June of that year.
Mr Boyd revealed that roughly 1000 people were involved at the core of those blood-thirsty spectator events; and although the pastime was thought to have started among North Island gangs in the 1980s, by that stage it included wealthy, respectable businessmen, and organised pockets in the South Island.
A particularly sickening factor in these dog-fighting cases was the discovery that they attracted thousands of fringe spectators who brought whole families along to the events. Witnesses claimed a paddling pool had been set up in the back yard at one location for toddlers.
This highlights a further alarming aspect of an overall, troubling picture - a picture which is clearly showing us a growing lack of basic humaneness and empathy in families over the generations, as opposed to isolated cases of sadism perpetrated by a small minority of deeply-disturbed individuals.
Sadistic attacks on animals occur more frequently in lower socio-economic, rural areas, such as parts of Northland; but the latest List of Shame, published in October, indicated that young people in the lower South Island were among the worst offenders over the past year.
The recent list noted several shocking crimes in Canterbury and Southland; but Dunedin, and Otago as a whole, was also highlighted as a particular trouble spot.
Over the past five years there have been more than a dozen serious Otago incidents listed, including the pickling of four puppies drowned for that purpose, the poisoning of around 20 pigeons near the Octagon, hens tortured by a primary school pupil, and a kitten severed in two in a graveyard.
A 19-year-old Dunedin man's 2009 crime was especially notable because it received what was at that point the longest prison sentence handed out for animal cruelty in New Zealand: a mere 12 months, of which only 10 were served.
In an incident lasting half an hour, the man attempted to strangle a Jack Russell terrier in a garden shed. When this failed, he poured petrol down the dog's throat, then finished it off with a shovel. Children watched the whole episode, and investigators later learned that the dog had been tormented by neighbourhood children on several occasions, which included having a vacuum cleaner tied to its testicles.
All this shows that the pronounced increase of sadistic violence against animals is only a symptom of society's degradation as a whole. If Kiwis are serious when they claim domestic violence and abuse is not OK, this trend with animals must also be given greater gravity and attention.
Astoundingly, despite the known links, barely any research has been carried out here beyond a survey of New Zealand vets. Meanwhile, police attend thousands of domestic-violence callouts daily, and CYFS receives thousands of calls about the flourishing neglect and abuse of children.
Is it going too far to suggest that the diminishment of human value seen in domestic abuse cases might in some way reflect consumer-capitalism's frequent exploitation and unethical treatment of people as so-called human resources?
Whatever the case, when 23 seals are brutally clubbed to death, and our secondary reaction after horror is concern for the South Island's tourism industry, something is obviously, very, very wrong.
- Hayden Williams is a Dunedin writer.
