"In A World Of Her Own"

The question is rhetorical, but why might we reasonably expect human beings to treat helpless animals with compassionate care, when those same human beings treat one another with violent contempt? Well, perhaps because animals who rely on humans for their very existence once they have become domesticated call upon something deep within us to viscerally react against cruelty to animals.

Now that's a fond hope. Helpless infants are abused by their own parents all too often, and there are more than sufficient instances in the public eye where it is revealed just how brutally we behave to one another by one incident after another where people do real harm to one another and until they're hauled before a court of justice experience no remorse.

Violator of the rights of innocent helpless creatures beware; there are snooping eyes everywhere that may, in the end, bring to the attention of the wider public what manner of moral imbecile you are. In the case of a grey-haired woman - that descriptive; 'woman', 'mature', meant to emphasize that there, at least one might expect decent behaviour - that proved to be just the case.

Where a security camera installed by a family as a result of having experienced personal home thefts, captured images clearly revealing a woman whose nasty impulse against a helpless cat, identified her. The result being that great numbers of the public in Coventry, central England, would dearly enjoy doing to her what she did to that cat.

Which is to say, if they could get across protective police barriers. To confront and hiss their contempt at a woman who could gently stroke a cat sitting on a fence outside the home where it lived, gaining its trust only to capture it and slam it into a large garbage bin that stood nearby. And then leaving the scene, conscience untroubled by the probable fate of the creature.

Fortunately, its owners heard the cat miaowing in stress and searched to discover its whereabouts, finally finding it, to their amazement and the cat's good fortune, to have been locked into the garbage bin. And when they checked the video footage of their security camera, there it was, all clearly laid out before their incredulous eyes.

Well, what this woman did is not considered to be a criminal offence. Violence and cruelty to animals can be overlooked. There are so many other laws on the books for public social offenders, to add another in defence of domesticated animals would be too arduously difficult to enforce, clogging up the courts and distressing people no end.

These things happen. The cat was rescued, after all, no worse for its ordeal, and undoubtedly a trifle more cautious about whom it will readily give its trust to. Including women whose defenders claim they love animals, and particularly cats. And the woman the video identified and whom members of the public would enjoy lynching?

Clearly illegal. That would be classified as a criminal act. And, in any event, according to the woman's mother "she was just in a world of her own".