24/11/2022
Worth a read!
REPORT IT . . . NOT ALWAYS SO STRAIGHT FORWARD
A friend of mine was once in Scarborough and saw a man standing on the sidewalk with a white female dog tied to a long rope. She asked him what he was doing. He openly told her that the dog was in heat and he was waiting to attract male dogs to her. Once they stuck on to her (to mate) he would take them home and set them into the cage where he kept his pitbulls, so that they could rip the dog apart. This apparently was not a one-off exercise of his.
Some time after, a video of this act came into the hands of an animal care professional who reported the case, with the video as evidence. He was told that the video was not enough evidence.
Ditto for the video evidence of the man beating the caiman to death. It did not stand up as enough evidence and the man is walking free.
Ditto for the Tobago Husky killed earlier this year while someone recorded the act from the upper room of a nearby house.
If such heinous cases with visual evidence are not taken seriously, what becomes of cases like the man who is threatening to tie the mother dog to a tree and leave her in the forest to die. His admission of the proposed crime should be enough evidence.
Sadly, however, people in communities fear vengeance and therefore do not report these cases.
Their considerations include—"Will the person we report come to do something to us/our property.our animals in revenge?" . . . "Is the perpetrator related to the police officer to whom the report is being made?" (common in Tobago) . . . etc. The list goes on.
This is why so many senseless crimes against animals are allowed to be committed . . . are accepted . . . are normalized . . . are possibly even celebrated by those who like to boast of their exploits.
What can change such a culture?
Yes . . . we hear it too often said, casually, as a justification . . . "It is part of we culture."
(Trinidad and Tobago Police Service, please take note).
