There’s news this week about another—another!—cockfighting ring busted by local officials, this one near the Santa Maria airport. Writers have spilled a lot of ink on this subject, but that still doesn’t seem to staunch the blood that the birds themselves are spilling for sport, so gamblers can get a sadistic thrill while watching two creatures maim and attack and kill each other.
The icing on that cake of awful is that the suspects apparently set up their gladiator-style fowl combat in the midst of a cluster of beehives, maybe operating under the belief that the honey-makers would provide some sort of cover. I guess they thought law enforcement agents would be too scared to come close. “Bees! No way,” they’d say. “I’m not going in there.”
As I was learning about this latest headline in the world of animal cruelty, I was still reeling from another report that had come across my desk, this one of a cat killing. The Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office recently announced an animal cruelty charge in the case of a woman accused of choking and stabbing her ex’s pet.
It’s all so ugly, I hardly even have the words to express my disgust.
Last week, the Sun reported on Santa Maria landing in the No. 10 slot on a list of the most violent cities in California. While local leaders have debated the accuracy of the statistics behind that ranking, I had a different issue with it: I didn’t see animal cruelty counted among the crimes that are lumped together by the FBI Uniform Crime Reports under the “violent crimes” umbrella.
I’ve already written about how agencies around the state apparently have no collective standard for how to report domestic violence, making the “uniform” in “uniform crime reports” a difficult word in which to put one’s trust. And if police offices and sheriff’s departments can’t agree on what, exactly, domestic violence is, I’m not at all surprised to learn that animal cruelty is also a bit of a thorny issue. In 2013, the program began collecting sexual assault data based on a “new, more inclusive definition” of rape, which had been approved in 2011.
“Now instances in which offenders use drugs or alcohol on victims who know them, or offenders who sodomize victims of the same gender will be counted as rape for statistical purposes,” reads a document from the FBI.
Stuff like that gives me hope that humanity will get its collective act together someday.
Someday.
Canary must admit that she does like the song, “Live and Let Die,” though that motto doesn’t reflect her stance on her fellow creatures. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 9-16, 2014.