One of those cases where I support the death penalty:
Northern Virginia man convicted of stomping a cat to death told a Loudoun County judge yesterday that he regretted what happened, but insisted that his actions were a desperate attempt to stop the declawed, 14-year-old cat from biting his leg.
The argument did not sway Circuit Court Judge J. Howe Brown. In sentencing Peter J. Landrith, 39, to three years in prison, all suspended, and five years’ probation, Brown was emphatic that Landrith maliciously killed the cat.
“There isn’t any doubt about that at all,” Brown said.
Under the terms of his probation, Landrith is required to undergo a mental health evaluation, barred for life from owning animals and obligated to maintain steady employment and a stable living situation.
Landrith was convicted of felony animal cruelty in October, nearly a year after Luke, a tabby who lived in the Leesburg townhouse that Landrith shared with his then-girlfriend and one of her adult sons, died of trauma, his abdomen filled with blood. Landrith faced as much as five years in prison.
Chad Cornell, the son, testified at trial that he found Landrith stomping his foot into a trash can. Luke was at the bottom, bloody and breathing heavily, Cornell said. According to Cornell, Landrith said Luke tried to eat his sandwich and bit him when he shooed the cat away.
This makes me sick to my stomache. There is a special place in hell for people who abuse children and animals, and this sick bastard did both when he killed the family pet.
(Via Sullivan)
I know this is upsetting, but just go look at this picture of Fiona and her person and it makes the pain go away.
Pooh
Let me beat the rush and make the obvious joke.
Clearly, he needed his wife at the trial, crying. Then we’d be up in arms by how mean the judge was.
Geek, Esq.
St. Francis of Assisi
ppGaz
Well, I’m a guy who walked on a busy freeway to rescue a cat.* So I’m not exactly objective about these things. I think that stomping the gentleman in a garbage can until he is bloody and breathing heavily would be a fitting treatment.
*Don’t try this at home. It was a very foolish thing to do. I got lucky and got away with it.
Paul Wartenberg
During one patch of depression in my life I was able to rescue a turtle from a busy street. I never felt happier during that depressive funk.
J.E.
Yipes. I thought this was a cat blog entry at first glance. I agree. Hang him.
Joey
Hanging’s too quick. Send the sonofabitch to one of those torture camps in Eastern Europe. And keep him alive as long as possible. Three three years and probation doesn’t even begin to fit his crime.
Andrew
Ugh. I concur with the death penalty.
A bunch of the dogs I walked at the shelter as recently as Tuesday were put down today. Please remove the kitty picture from the front page. It’s too heartbreaking.
The Other Steve
That’s interesting. Three years, eh? Good to see a litle justice.
The Disenfranchised Voter
This incident alone is depressing and outrageous but the part above just makes it worse. It speaks volumes about the asshole who did it.
kshead
Three years suspended plus probation? Not enough.
Krista
Horrible, horrible man. Evil man. May he be alone, and unhappy for the rest of his wretched existence.
RonB
Three years suspended, Steve. That’s no justice at all. Being a meat eater it’s hard to say something righteous about cruelty to animals, but this lack of empathy for a domestic creature like a cat probably says something about his approach to things in the human realm. Flog him and banish him.
ChristieS
Your voice to Bast’s ear…
StupidityRules
One sick fuck.
But capital punishment for killing an animal?
And if so is there a difference between killing an animal for food or killing it without a reason?
Is there a difference between killing a domestic animal, like a cat, or a cow?
Is there a difference between killing a cute animal, like a cat, or a not so cute animal like a rat?
If the cat had been used as a test animal and then killed, should the person that killed it also be sentenced to death?
Taliban PETA here we come…
BTW, I “own” a cat, I’m a vegetarian, and I totally oppose the death penalty.
Joey
There is a tremendous difference between killing a cat that is a pet, and killing for food or killing a rat, which can be considered a pest and can damage property and spread disease. I’d love to see this bastard die a brutal, painful death. As far as test animals go, well that’s a tricky one, but still, a test animal is not a family pet.
Krista
For torturing the poor thing and for stomping it to death after placing it in a garbage can, and then for being such a chickenshit as to try to claim a form of self-defense? Not capital punishment…I think many of us are speaking from emotion here. But he is a sick, hateful, bad person, and deserves misery and nothing but.
StupidityRules
Is it ok to take your healthy pet cat to the vet and have it put down?
Is it ok to kill feral cats?
If your cat would be in mortal peril due to your neighbour trying to kill it would it be ok for you to use lethal force to save the cat?
Is it ok to kill a cat if I intend to eat it afterwards?
Is it ok to hunt and kill animals that doesn’t damage any property and doesn’t spread any diseases?
am
google(Krugman’s cat)
StupidityRules
Totally agree.
my cat
Shoot him. The lack of empathy toward a harmless creature makes him a threat to everyone.
Yes.Maybe. No, use nonlethal force. No. No.,
My opinion. The reason for the “maybe” on feral cats is that feral populations of domestic amnimals are endangering some populations of native animals. Cats kill a awful lot of birds.
Krista
Is it ok to take your healthy pet cat to the vet and have
no
maybe, if they are carrying disease and threaten the rest of the animal population.
nonlethal force.
christ, no.
personally, not something I’d do. But if done humanely and without waste, recreational hunting can be much less cruel than the commercial meat industry.
Look, SR – I respect your viewpoint. To many people, killing any animal is cruel, full stop. Other people are of the opinion that killing an animal for food is okay, as long as they do not suffer. But I think we can all agree that deliberately making an animal suffer a prolonged death is cruel, and that the man who killed that cat deserves whatever karma decides to bestow upon him.
ppGaz
I wasn’t aware that vets would put down a healthy animal for no reason. I kept a cat for 18 years that was a “please put down” cat which its owners decided had become to expensive to care for. The vet’s staff canvassed for a home and found … me, the biggest cat sucker on earth. Beebs was more than a member of the family, she was a fixture, a celebrity for all those years. We keep her ashes over there in a box on the wall unit.
There’s always a home for a healthy pet, it just takes some time and care to find it.
Andrew J. Lazarus
This is an exception to my abolitionist beliefs in the death penalty.
By the way, you guys shouldn’t miss The Daily Show tonight. (Off-topic.)
Joey
The only problem with these questions is that they don’t apply to the situation. This man, for no reason, beat and killed a domesticated pet. Some of your questions are valid. But they don’t apply to this situation. The man deserves every negative thing possible to happen to happen. Hopefully that includes a painful, prolonged existence.
Krista
Andrew – watching it as we speak.
Joey
And if a neighbor was trying to hurt one of my animals, I would have no problem killing him/her. I don’t have the means, but they’re part of the family, and I would do anything to protect them.
Sine.Qua.Non
This is too depressing. Twice in one day. In San Antonio, some fucking asshole was just convicted of his second animal killing where he beat the dog to death and then decapitated him. I started crying when the showed the scene on the news. It was awful. My visually-oriented mind is bad enough as it is and that made it really worse. Been depressed about it all night. I just don’t understand these psychopaths.
By the way, if someone was harming my animal? They would get back 10-fold EXACTLY whatever they did to my dog. Including death. Fuck them. I’m nonviolent, but cruelty to animals, children and the helpless, that definately sets me off.
Mr Furious
1. NO. As mentioned above, hopefully the vet will take that cat away, and find it a home
2. I’d rather take it out on the people resonsible for the feral cats, but if it’s a health issue, capture and humane death. I have a big fucking problem with the new cat-hunting law in Wisconson (?).
3. If that’s what it took, yeah. But he’d get a (brief) warning first…
4. You don’t plan to, so this is a dumb question. But I suppose if you were starving or homeless, I would have mercy…
5. I never would, and I do not quite see the appeal, but I’ll go along with legal deer hunting and hunting of similar non-endangered animals that actually need population control.
As far as this piece of shit excuse for a human, I hope animal abusers get the same treatment as child abusers in prison. I wish the local dog warden was Vic Mackey and he got a few shots in when he was caught.
Pb
I say, get someone on that NSA wiretapping list to call him, and get him implicated in some terrorist plot or another. Then, extraordinary rendition to Uzbekistan, to be held, shocked, beaten, asphyxiated, starved, and/or boiled alive.
Or, in Stormy-speak: arrange for the government to take him on an all-expenses paid trip to a friendly country where he will stay at a local resort providing housing, the indigenous massage and spa treatments, the hot tub, and–best of all–lemon chicken, rice, broccoli, carrots, bread and two types of fruit.
S.W. Anderson
I’m with St. Francis. That “sick bastard” revealed something about himself that ought to scare the daylights out of everyone who comes in contact with him.
Isn’t it ironic, the cat was just an animal but Landrith is the beast?
Laura
It’s heartbreaking to think that money could be the reason for putting an animal down. My take home pay was only about $2000 a month when my cat Heathcliff needed surgery and hospital stay totalling about $1200. Fortunately, I was able to borrow the money from my dad. Heathcliff had eaten a string (that he got from the bottom of my box spring – check the bottom of your box springs for tears – they’re deadly!). If I had done nothing, he would have died painfully. The surgery was extreme – they would have cut him open completely from the back of his throat, through his stomach, and to the end of his intestines, and the survival rate was only 50%. The other option was to euthanize him. Just the idea made me sob. Heathcliff survived the surgery, and I visited him twice every day at the hospital, at lunch and after work. He was hooked up to an IV and the technicians would put the IV on a portable stand and bring him out of his cage and he’d sit on my lap. I would have slept there had they let me. He ended up coming home two days early (I credit the visits) which saved me a couple hundred dollars. Everybody at work thought I was crazy. But the technicians at the hospital didn’t seem bothered by me. Maybe they talked about me after I left each time, but I suspect I wasn’t the first crazy woman they’d met. 8 years later, Heathcliff’s still doing great. However, after I brought him home, he had to eat baby food or chicken and white rice because he couldn’t digest regular cat food yet. I foolishly went with the chicken and rice. He and his sister had never shown any interest in people food before. Since then, however, they’ve been little beggars.
Sirkowski
That’s how PETA gets away with their antics.
Laura
Perfect.
Laura
I agree. When kids hurt animals, alarm bells go off. I don’t know why it would be any different for an adult. If he reacts this violently to a cat in a sweater, I’d be afraid to know what other little thing would set him off next.
Krista
No wonder the poor beastie bit him. He probably could tell what kind of person he was. Many people think that animals can sense things about humans, that other humans cannot see. I’m inclined to agree.
After I read this, I went and gave Dreyfus a big hug. He looked slightly alarmed, but I don’t think he minded too much.
Bob In Pacifica
If I recall his bio, young George Walker Bush used to stick firecrackers up frogs’ butts. Psychiatrists say that animal torture in youth is a predictor of violent anti-social behavior as an adult. Young Dubya used to shoot his bb gun at playmates and siblings. Not unlike a certain dictator from Central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, we suffer a leader whose excesses derive from psychotic behavior he developed as a youth.
Jim Jones also tortured animals as a child.
Brian
This guy’s defense makes no sense, and I speak from some experience.
We have a cat who can freak out for little to no reason – yeah, what cat doesn’t – but this one, when panicked, may attack as well. It happens rarely, but it did to me.
I had been changing the message on the answering machine, and Casper was confused about how I could be over here and my voice over there, and hopped up on the table to check it out. I picked him up to move him, and he went nuts, clawing and biting. I ended up with four huge scratches down my arms about seven inches long, three bad bites, and a gash on my finger so bad I could see the bone and blood ran from it, like a bad horror movie. (Still have a white scar from that.)
However, I didn’t stomp the cat to death; I didn’t even hurt him, I just threw him into a room. (Okay, maybe he bounced when he hit, but certainly not fer Chrissakes stomping!) That’s all.
If this guy was in such danger from biting that he needed to stomp the cat to death, by Bast he better have holes the size of half-dollars in his legs that were still bleeding. Anything else, and he’s a liar.
Vlad
I never rescued a cat, but my dad and I (plus some other random other driver) did stop four lanes of traffic to help herd baby geese across the road.
That guy’s a jerk and a half. I’d love to see him get busted for littering next week, and have to go in the joint for the full term.
neil
Yikes. I was going to make a snarky analogy between stomping on a declawed cat and going to war to disarm Iraq, but after reading the comments thread I realize that I’ll probably get attacked for hyperbole. After all, the Iraq war wasn’t _that_ bad.
ppGaz
I had a similar experience some years ago with a pet rabbit. The furry monster went loco and started kicking the bejeezus out of me with its hind legs for whatever reason. I have the scars on my arm 20 years later.
I think I just dropped the little hellion and ran for my life. While I was bandaging my wounds, he was calmly eating some rabbit food as if nothing had happened.
But hey, these are animals, and it is not always for us to understand what they are doing. And it’s never necessary to injure them for it.
BIRDZILLA
Im sure the idiots at PETA will want him drawn and quartered
ppGaz
Pretty much everyone would gladly draw and quarter you, mister “this is your brain on drugs” Birdzilla.
Jeremy
I agree with most of you, hang him slowly… however, if you want to see some cute to overcome the sadness here try
http://www.kittenwar.com/
It made me feel better :-)
ubernerd83
Speaking of horrible people, here’s another disgusting story.
Stories like this really make me question my belief that all human beings have some inherent worth.
(via POE News)
OCSteve
For once I can agree with most of the commenters here (the exceptions being those who have to drag in Iraq, NSA, etc. even in this thread). I’m not even a cat person…
Any pet lover would feel the same way. Someone who abuses a pet is as bad as someone who abuses their child to me.
We lost our 6 year old Sheltie to bladder cancer a couple of years ago. If I had it to do over again, I would have just put her down when it became obvious she was in pain. Instead, we drug it out for a few months. Surgery, then chemotherapy – which is very experimental for dogs – and in our case, did not help a bit. She refused to eat anything – I mean even her favorite people food (she wouldn’t eat steak or hamburger, not a bite of anything). I force fed her for weeks. We ran up almost $10,000 in vet bills. Fortunately we had a great vet that worked with us to pay it off over time.
I feel guilty to this day. Not for spending that kind of money on a lost cause, but for prolonging her life and her pain because we were too selfish to let go.
Uberweiss
That picture is just breaking my heart. I hope that bastard burns in hell for what he did.
Maggie45
Jeremy, I have that as one of my toolbar bookmarks at work. Whenever I start feeling stressed I click on it and instantly am filled with a sense of ok-ness. I also can’t bring myself to vote for one over another, so always click on draw. lol. I have a co-worker who comes rushing over every so often and says..”can I see some kittens”? I love that site. I have four of my own, all rescues, and two dogs, also rescues.
neil
I don’t think that mentioning Iraq was a nonsequitir at all. Iraq always seemed to pose as much threat to the U.S., to me, as a declawed cat might pose to a healthy adult. This conclusion seems now to be supported by the facts. It also seemed that attacking Iraq was a senseless act of cruelty which, if I may say so, goes many orders of magnitude beyond killing one person’s pet. More like killing a hundred thousand people’s family members.
It is nice, anyway, to see that people who supported the war did not necessarily do so because they approved of this sort of pointless cruelty — in many cases it was simply because they didn’t understand it well enough. I’d like to brainstorm some ways that this connection could be made explicit. Perhaps through that old warblogger favorite — proof through grisly photographs.
Lest we forget.
Krista
I’m with you, OCSteve. I just don’t understand how anybody could deliberately torment and abuse an innocent creature.
Poor Luke. I hope he’s chasing birds, eating caviar and snuggling into soft, warm pillows in kitty heaven.
gswift
158
ah. i am going to be fighting off the police??
The point is that if someone is enraged, or even particularly determined, that pepper spray isn’t the deterrent you think it is.
first of all, i have to agree with previous comments that this has got to be one of the LEAST EFFECTIVE ways to successfully defend yourself, especially in a city.
second of all, it surely would feel like murder. i, like the police, prefer crime be stopped WITHOUT the loss of human life, including the lives of criminals. i have no desire to have the experience of killing someone, particularly when it is unnecessary, and i believe this experience would also affect you much more strongly than you apparently realize.
I’m not advocating whipping a gun out at the first sign of danger, but sometimes you get backed into a corner and there’s not a lot of options. It would be nice if every time there was the option to run away, or just shout for help, or have enough time to run a fucking ladder out the window and put your baby in a backpack to take along, but that’s not reality.
It sounds like precious few of you have experienced much violence first hand. Defending yourself (when you can’t run away) is especially difficult for women, who are certainly going to be facing someone who is physically bigger and stronger. What the hell are they supposed to do if they have someone enter their residence and escape isn’t an option? Calling the police is a good first step, but when the violent threatening ex-boyfriend has just broken in, the fifteen minutes it’s going to take the police to arrive are an eternity.
I have no desire to experience killing someone either, but people who break into other peoples homes should accept getting shot as one of the perils of the venture.
gswift
crap, ignore the above, was screwing with multiple browser windows and this was pasted in the wrong one
Krista
Stories like that make me think that if there is a God, he washed his hands of us long ago…and I don’t blame him.
Tony Alva
It would be a pleasure to beat that man to death with my fists.
ET
Oh yeah, any cat that allows itself to be put in a peach and white sweater and allows itself to be photographed is going to be a truly vicious cat.
Shoot the bastard.
jobiuspublius
I don’t visit often, so, I have to wonder about the outrage on this site for when business or political interests cause death or harm to humans.
Buddy
John, its an effing cat. Capital punishment for the death of a cat? Are you off your gourd? I mean really..
Rob G
Buddy, we train, declaw, castrate and abuse animals for our amusement. And by “declaw”, I mean what would translate for us as “amputate the fingertip”.
It’s an effing cat. Yep. And you’re an effing waste of space.
Rob G
jobiuspublius, my outrage stems from this; no animal ever asked to be part of our particular Human Comedy. We forced them into our lives, and shaped them to our requirements. And when they suffer, we deny their suffering (shit, they’re only animals!).
A cat doesn’t give a fig for my feelings, and would torture me mercilessly if I were a mouse. But it wouldn’t even come close to what we do, just for our convenience.
BIRDZILLA
Im not on drags and i mean what i said ppGAZ
Mark the Machinist
Just shoot the cat.
Cats are free, but bullets are pretty cheap, especially .22 Long Rifle, however the .22 short is fairly effective on cats.
Taking a cat to the Vet is for the wealthy and those who are too gutless to handle their own dirty laundry.
In my experience the quickest and most humane way to eliminate a cat is the 12 gauge shotgun with #9 or better shot at a range of about 12 feet, but this is not an indoor activity.
Good luck, and have fun!
Mark