KILLED CAT WITH POKER

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 December 1944, Page 8

KILLED CAT WITH POKER

HOTEL MANAGER. FINED A hotel manager, Arthur A. Tuarl, was lined £l5 by Mr. Paterson. S.M., in the Magistrate’s Court, Rotorua, for cruelly ill-treating and causing unnecessary suffering to a cat. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals laid the information, reports the “New Zealand Herald.” Nella Marguerita Vernon, of Wairakei, said that on the night under review she and other members of the Grand Hotel staff watched through a window while defendant aided by his dog, chased a cat in the hotel kitchen with a poker and also with a nailstudded piece of board. After chasing it round for almost an hour defendant had killed the cat with a blow from the poker. There were 15 or 20 cats under the building and they were difficult to corner. Defendant in evidence, said he had been driven to distraction, and in the last two years complaints by guests had run into hundreds. On that day he had upended a tin over a cat, which he discovered there, and worked it down to the kitchen, intending to place it in a bag, but it escaped. He said that the fatal blow was the only time he had hit it during the chase. The magistrate suggested that the matter of eradicating the cats could have been solved by the spending of a little money. “I am prepared to hold as a matter of law that it is cruelty to put a dog on to a cat in an enclosed space,” said the magistrate. Defendant’s action in chasing the cat round the room would undoubtedly infuriate it, and in his opinion to beat a cat with a poker constituted cruelty as defined by the section of the Act. If the conditions were as bad as had been made out, the Licensing Committee, had it been aware of it, would undoubtedly have insisted on something benig done. Defendant could have destroyed this particular cat in other ways. “Had I concluded that defendant deliberately shut the cat in a room and set out to chivvy it till he was able to kill it, I should have had no hesitation in imposing a term of imprisonment, but the present case is not of that kind,” said Mr. Paterson.