Urge Prosecution of Texas Cat Mutilation

In Gatesville, Texas, the county attorney's office and city officials are being unresponsive to reports that Butch Barton, a city employee, tortured and mutilated a kitten on city property late last year. The incident reportedly occurred after two Gatesville city employees found a kitten in a park and brought her back to their shop to give her food and water. The next day, shop employees heard the anguished cries of the kitten and saw Barton walk out of the shop with the kitten's severed tail in his hand.

While the kitten survived, Gatesville officials refuse to charge Barton with animal cruelty, arguing that Texas law does not apply to the kitten because she had no "owner" at the time of the abuse. But an animal does not need to be "owned" to be protected in Texas. State law prohibits the torture of any "domesticated living creature and wild living creature previously captured." The Gatesville case is particularly important because it is the latest in a string of high-profile cruelty cases in Texas in which the alleged abusers have evaded prosecution due to misinterpretations of the state's animal protection law.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Contact Coryell County Attorney Edwin E. Powell, Jr. and urge him to charge Barton with animal cruelty. Let him know that his office is obligated to enforce the state animal cruelty law, which includes protecting captured strays.

Edwin E. Powell, Jr.
Coryell County Attorney
P.O. Box 796
Gatesville, TX 76528
254-865-8261
Fax: 254-865-9080 (press the "star" key after dialing)

A MARRIED police couple have been found guilty of a cruelty charge against their pet cat.

Beverley and Derek Lodge, both 42, denied causing unnecessary suffering to 15-year-old Buttons by failing to take him to see a vet.

When the RSPCA found him after a report by a neighbour the cat was almost half its ideal weight. His right eye had shrunk into its skull owing to an untreated tumour and the animal could not walk straight because of a central nervous system disorder.

The couple, both serving officers with Lancashire Police, lived in Newton Street, Billinge when neighbour James Ashcroft found the cat collapsed in his yard last March. He phoned the RSPCA and officer Carla Hay and took him to a vet.

She told the court: "It was very thin, it was swaying from side to side and had a very bad infection to its eye. It was foul smelling and had caked-on faeces to its back legs."

The couple now living in Shaws Road, Southport, had insisted that the cat was not in this state the last time they had seen it.

The cat was put down that day as was in the last stages of a terminal disease. But friends and relatives of the couple insisted that the cat had continued to eat and looked well just a month earlier.

Magistrates at Wigan gave the couple a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered them to pay £1,000 between them towards costs.

Chief magistrate James Banks said: "Although we accept there was no deliberate attempt to cause suffering, the animal must have suffered for several weeks and should have received care earlier."

It is not yet known if the couple plan to appeal against their conviction.

After the court case RSPCA officer Carla Hay, told the M.E.N.: "At the end of the day the cat did suffer, and it was unnecessary, and that has been shown up in court.

"When I found the cat its eye, the smell and the wobbly gait shocked me and it was so skinny."

A Lancashire Police spokesman said no decision had been made on disciplinary action against the couple.