Posted on 02/17/2012 4:43:04 PM PST by GSWarrior
FRESNO, Calif. — It was the sound of a wailing cat that first caught the neighbor’s attention. When she looked toward the sound she told authorities that she saw her next-door neighbor cutting off the crying feline’s head with a knife.
The call she subsequently made to deputies started a bizarre animal cruelty investigation that has focused attention from around the country on a working-class neighborhood in a Bakersfield suburb where a man allegedly was fileting cats and cooking them on his backyard barbecue.
“I’ve been getting calls on this from around the country,” Kern County Sheriff’s spokesman Ray Pruitt said. “For some reason when somebody hurts animals people are more outraged than they are for a lot of other cases.”
Investigators decided to release new details on Thursday because of the nationwide interest in the case.
Jason Wilmert, 35, will be arraigned today on charges alleging animal cruelty and using a pet or domesticated animal for food. Both are misdemeanors.
A neighbor told KBAK-TV that she had seen Wilmert with a wailing tabby cat cutting it down the back with a knife, then decapitating it. She turned away in disgust and called sheriff’s deputies.
Pruitt said that when deputies arrived that morning at Wilmert’s home they talked to other neighbors, who said they had heard the sounds of screaming cats coming from the house in Oildale. When he didn’t answer his door, Pruitt said a deputy walked down the driveway and saw a cat’s head in the backyard.
Later Pruitt came outside and deputies arrested him. When they searched his house they found a cat carcass in the kitchen sink, as if were being prepped for cooking. Deputies also found an animal trap in the driveway.
“We don’t know if he was using the trap to catch cats, but he had one,” Pruitt said.
Nobody has called in reporting missing pets, and investigators suspect the victims were strays.
Wilmert has been unable to post $22,500 bail on the animal cruelty charges and unrelated littering offenses. It was unclear if he had an attorney.
Supposedly, there are extensive underground chambers remaining from an abandoned mine under the streets of, IIRC, Paris. In one of the side chambers a group of explorers found a pile of small animal skulls which were later determined to be cat skulls.
Immediately over this pile of cat skulls they noticed an opening to daylight. Examination of a good map led them to this opening at the surface. It was an old well in the backyard of a restaurant which for years had specialized in rabbit dishes.
This story was in Readers Digest years ago.
Arguing with some people about this type of thing is a lost cause, I’d just let it go if I were you.
All kinds of people see cats as fair game for any kind of torture or mistreatment. To many of them, it is just a laugh a minute to imagine a cat being butchered alive.
Hard to believe, but many of them embrace the cruelty aspect.
Kids, I might understand, they sometimes don’t know any better, especially if they haven’t had parents who have told them on one level that killing with cruelty for the sheer entertainment value is sinful, and on a different level, what belongs to others is not yours to dispose of as you see fit.
I find some of the comments on this thread disturbing.
Just another brain fried Californicate doing his thing ...
FSSSSSSSSSSSSSST
Any ancestor of mine that ate cat would have been crazy.
Taste like........cat.
Yeah, you’re right. I’m done. :)
Explain how, given the article descriptions and the ways the animals were killed, alive and conscious enough for others to hear them screaming, that it wasn’t intentionally cruel? He obviously didn’t chop the heads off first, presumably to avoid them suffering through skinning them, given the eyewitness account (that you for some reason believe there may be reason to cast doubt on). They clearly were put through this to feel pain before being killed.
Animal fixation: Neighbour Steven Smith saw Wilmert starring at his dog and urged Wilmert to stop but he shrugged the incident off
Ya’ll just leave my cat alone.
And your point is?
Should have gotten far more punishment.
You are an idiot.
Yes, and these are suppose to be ‘conservatives’ with some moral compass.
He doesn’t appear to be suffering from starvation. Hard to tell.
I always wondered where the ranch, feed-lot, etc. for cat was located. And how do you become a catboy?
Not to mention the old chestnut about herding cats...
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