The NYPD says its hands are tied after a group of people sent their pit bulls after a well-known shop cat in Manhattan and cheered as they dogs brutally ended the tabby’s life.
Freddy was the resident moggie at Michelle Flowers, a florist on Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights. The little guy was outside the shop at about 9 p.m. on July 4 when a man and two women set their dogs loose on him, then celebrated and cheered as they killed him.
The pit bull owners then “smoked, danced and ate food while taking photos and mimicking the grisly scene,” according to the New York Post. Surveillance cameras caught the attack and its aftermath, showing the three black-clad dog owners and others who witnessed the violence and did nothing.
A disgusted neighbor contacted the Cat Collective, a group of volunteers who feed and care for strays in the neighborhood, and they collected Freddy’s remains, then told the florist’s owner what happened.
“Someone deliberately set dogs on a defenseless cat while people watched and cheered,” Dan Rimada of Bodega Cats of New York told the Post.
Cat Collective is offering cash rewards to anyone who can identify the dog owners and the celebrating bystanders, but the police won’t do anything.
An NYPD spokesman told the paper that “harm or death to an animal caused by another animal is not a criminal matter,” citing a gap in the law.
A proposed bill, dubbed Penny’s law after a chihuahua that was mauled by pit bulls earlier this year in Manhattan, hasn’t made it out of committee in the New York State legislature, while New York’s city council is looking at a municipal law that would make it a crime to set dogs on other animals.
It’s actually difficult to believe nothing can be done to get justice for Freddy, Penny and other animals aside from civil cases, which can only result in monetary damages.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who is controversial to say the least for creatively interpreting the law, seems like just the kind of district attorney who could find a way to prosecute the dog owners. The fact that the authorities are outright dismissing the possibility indicates Bragg doesn’t see this as a priority.
Working with the police to find ways to get justice is Bragg’s job, as well as the job of the attorneys working for him in the district attorney’s office. At the very least, they should be able to find something with which to charge the suspects, even if it really turns out there’s no way to hold them criminally accountable for Freddy’s death.
We hope Freddy’s killers are identified and held responsible, and we hope no more pets and strays have to be killed before lawmakers at the city and state level make it a priority to close an obvious gap in the law.
Cops won’t do anything … they never do. I think If scumbags are going to be vile & evil when it comes to animal cruelty like this. Then people who are enraged by it should be able to go out and hunt these shitbulls down and end their existence. And “IF” scumbags try to interfere … OH WELL .. they can cease breathing too
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Disgusting. Unbelievable to me that this is not illegal.
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If they thought this was a priority, or were sufficiently motivated by backlash, the DA and his staff would find a way to go after these people, even if it’s an indirect charge. Alvin Bragg, our DA, is famous for digging up archaic laws and repurposing them, but unfortunately he’s also famously soft on crime.
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BS!!!!! COPS CAN, BUT WILL NOT, DO A DAMNED THING!! After all its only a cat!!
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Some pitbulls already killed someones dog in Manhattan.
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Yeah that was the chihuahua case in May, the one the state bill is named after. (Penny’s Law)
We’ll see if this incident moves the needle for our notoriously ineffective state legislature.
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Bastards – I can’t believe the police won’t do anything!
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Back when I lived in Philly, I was a PAWS volunteer who once a week took care of the PAWS cats at the local PetSmart.
One day this dick-less wonder happened by, engaged in the entertainment of having his pitbull lunge at the cats (who, thank GOD were behind glass). I tried to be polite, i.e. “Can you please stop doing that? It scares the cats,’ but pretty soon I was all “A**HOLE, can you get your f**king dog away from the cats????’
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People blame the breed when it’s obvious it’s the kind of people who buy those dogs who are the problem. Not all of them, of course, but the pit bull does seem to be the preferred breed of anti-social and violent clowns. The Cat Collective post made it a point to note the dogs were victims here too, as there were apparently signs of abuse in the full footage. Who knows what sort of things people do to their dogs to get them to behave like that.
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Bastards , I can’t believe the police won’t do anything 😡
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I don’t understand why the law couldn’t be interpreted as the people using the dogs as weapons against the cat. Guess whoever’s in charge doesn’t want to
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We have a state attorney general and a Manhattan DA who are hyper-focused on politics, campaigned on promises to prosecute political enemies, and don’t seem to care about anything that doesn’t get them on TV, in the papers and in the online discourse. I’m not saying that from any ideological perspective, because honestly I strongly dislike ideology and the two-party system. I think it makes everything a zero-sum game, allows the electorate to abdicate their responsibility to think about issues individually, and is breaking our political system.
But the truth is, they don’t seem to care about animal-related crime or even basic quality of life, and that apathy is endemic in New York state politics. It’s one of the reasons the declawing ban was killed in committee for years until animal advocacy groups, a handful of lawmakers who care, and regular New Yorkers put so much pressure on the hold-outs that they could no longer justify doing what the state’s Veterinary Medical Association wanted, which was to keep declawing legal. (The VMAs are comprised of vets who see declawing, tail docking, etc., as revenue streams, not mutilation of animals.)
Anyway, the short version is that no, they don’t care. And you’re right, it wouldn’t take much to charge them with something, even if it’s abuse of the dogs themselves to turn them into aggressive, dangerous animals.
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Well, that stinks
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Not one of you addressed the following:
The ASPCA is in New York;
The ASPCA couldn’t care less about cats, as evidenced by the Terrance Wallace case (Little Wanderers flat out asked, “Where is the ASPCA?”
Siccing a dog on an animal = baiting.
As for the pitbulls, you do not need to “abuse” them to get them to attack animals. They were specifically created to attack animals: bulls, bears, lions, tigers, leopards, badgers, rats, cats and each other. Search GoFundMe for pitbull attack. Those dogs weren’t abused; nor did most belong to dogfighters (as the woman who sicced her pits on Freddy is. You’d be surprised how many dogfighters are women). Trying to PREVENT pitbulls from attacking animals is impossible. Eventually, hundreds of years of selective breeding, inbreeding and prey drive kick in. Usually that all culminates with a Reddit post saying, “My 6yo rescue pitbull just killed my cat.😭” Cats always pay the price for humans’ stupidity.
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The two main issues here are legislative and the attitude that animal-related crime isn’t worth the time to prosecute.
State law in New York as it pertains to animals needs a dramatic overhaul. The laws haven’t been meaningfully updated in more than a century.
That is where the ASPCA can be useful. They have public policy and lobbying arms. I don’t know if the problem is a lack of funds or higher priorities, but obviously they have not succeeded in prompting meaningful reform at the state level.
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I really hate to blow your mind here, but the ASPCA is corrupt AF. Since your comment section won’t let me post the link, google reddit DogfightingBusts ASPCA Snopes. You should also read the blog at thisisadvocacy.org. ALL of our national orgs are corrupt.
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That’s a Reddit thread with opinions. A Google search for the terms you listed turns up stories about various busts and a general Snopes index page listing posts about the veracity of stories about cosmetics testing on animals, various animal abuse claims and some political memes involving animals.
If you have something solid, I’ll happily take a look at it.
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That is MY Reddit thread with screenshots that you should read considering you’re purporting yourself to be a cat advocate. I also sent you to one of my websites. Here’s another that you’ve repeatedly ignored in my replies: nationaldogfighterregistry.com
Scroll allllllll the way through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, Texas and Ohio. See, specifically, Angelo McCoy, Sylvia Higgs and Kevin Baker in Ohio, vet tech Carlos Warren and Gregory Hunt in Virginia, David Tant in South Carolina, Benji Branham in Georgia, Alik Williamsmays and Hewitt Grant in Florida, Kerry and Michael Jones in Texas, Eliza Henriquez in Indiana and Terrance Wallace in New York. What do you see in common? 🐈⬛️🐈🐈⬛️🐈🐈⬛️🐈🐈⬛️🐈🐈⬛️🐈🐈⬛️🐈 They ALL kill cats and have been since the 1700s in England, where it was called cat worrying. Worrying = grabbing, shaking and disemboweling. Like the RSPCA in England, Henry Bergh’s ASPCA used to send lists of crimes it had charged people with to newspapers. February 10, 1876, a newspaper reported that the ASPCA had prosecuted 810 animal cruelty cases in 1875. Twenty were dogfighting; four were cat worrying. So given everything in this paragraph, why would the ASPCA tell Snopes that it had never heard about dogfighters killing cats and kittens? BECAUSE IT IS CORRUPT.🤬 The same reason the ASPCA laid off nearly 20 animal cruelty investigators and shut down its animal cruelty investigation unit after Bershadker became CEO.
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Ah!
So this is a conspiracy that goes back to the 1700s in the UK, as if the RSPCA and ASPCA, which are unaffiliated groups in two separate countries, are actually one ancient order of cat abusers that requires its members to take a vow of silent cat hatred so they can continue ignoring cat-related crime over the centuries. They certainly are devious in their passivity.
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Funny how my last reply never posted. Cat got your tongue?
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There is no comment from you in my notifications or in my spam queue.
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