That’s sadism, not ‘animal cruelty’

A cat has been found dead with a piece of jagged pipe twisted round its neck.

Some people have seen this as evidence of cruelty to animals, but I don’t think so.

It looks like evidence of sadism, and anyone with a sadistic bent is going to vent his urges on any living thing he is able to.

It is unlikely that he can get away with twisting some sharp tubing round the neck of one of his work colleagues, or whoever else might happen to have attracted his sadistic attentions, and so he exercises his passions on a cat instead.

Dogs are a little more difficult. They snarl and they bite, and there are fewer of them around in the streets.

I don’t know why anyone is surprised, really. There was a group of boys a few years older than me, when I was a child in Sliema, who used to get their thrills from disembowelling stray cats and otherwise torturing them. And in case you’re wondering, the answer is no, they didn’t turn out all right in the long run, though for many years they maintained the pretence of normality with wives and children and cars and flats and the rest of it.

They also had a reputation for bullying the smaller boys at school. Never marry a man who has a history replete with tortured cats, girls.

Cruelty to animals is something else again. It is, I suspect, largely the result of failing to consider animals as sentient beings – and so it doesn’t matter if they are kept without shelter from sun and rain, with not enough food or water, or in spaces that are too small for them.

There is a marked difference between this kind of thinking and behaviour and actually torturing a cat to death with a piece of jagged pipe for the sheer hell of it.

The first kind of person can possibly be made to see things in a different light through help and education – but as for the second kind of person, forget it. That’s a case for the psychiatrists, and as can be seen from the large numbers of sadistic murderers in prisons the world over, even they can’t really help.

It’s going to be impossible to identify the man who tortured that cat, but let’s say he could be identified. Why would that be desirable?

It is not, as the ‘animal cruelty’ people say, so that he may be fined and made an example of. No, I see it differently. I would wish that man to be identified, even if he cannot be prosecuted, because he needs to be monitored.

Whoever he is, he is clearly disturbed, and may turn to other releases for his sadism before long, if he hasn’t done so already.

Man or boy

You might think it strange that I’ve assumed it’s a man (or boy). I may, of course, be terribly wrong – but in my experience of life so far, I have met many boys and men with these tendencies, but absolutely no girls or women. Let’s say that Myra Hindley became an icon of evil precisely because she was seen as the exception that proved the rule.

There have been other women like her – more recent cases – who aided and abetted their men in the sexual abuse and torture of girls, boys and other women, but the key words here are ‘aided and abetted’. The women got nothing out of it themselves except the vague and largely futile hope that collaboration with their man would help them hang onto him.

As to why they should want to hang onto a man like that, speculation on their psychology defeats me completely.

The tickets are cheap but so are The People

There was a letter in a newspaper some days ago from one of the individuals who, before Renzo Piano’s plans were revealed, campaigned actively for a theatre on the opera house site. He is now devoting his energies to campaigning for a theatre with a roof.

His letter struck me because it was one of complaint that he was asked for the princely sum of €20 for a ticket to watch, at the Argotti Gardens, a live transmission of a performance at Covent Garden, featuring Joseph Calleja.

Though this man has a very decent income, he protested that €20 are exorbitant, and so he refused to buy a ticket (which was then bought by somebody else, but never mind). He argued that charging €20 is no way to bring opera to The People, and that such events should be offered free of charge.

It escaped his notice that if this were to happen, then The People will end up paying for the events whether they go to them or not, through their taxes.

But that is a minor detail. The more interesting point is that this is the mindset of those who argued most vociferously for a concert hall, an opera house, a multi-functional arts centre: we demand that it be set up, but we are not going to pay for tickets. The qamel is unbelievable.

Still more unbelievable is the failure to understand basic human psychology. Free performances attract greater numbers of people who like that kind of performance to start with, but they will not draw in people who are not attracted to that particular genre.

Let’s just say that wild horses wouldn’t drag people who are bored by opera to a performance of opera, even if it is free of charge. On the other hand, if you paid them to go, you might find some takers, but even then, most opera-haters would probably find something better to do of a Saturday night than sit through three hours of what they perceive to be utter tedium for the small remuneration of €20.

The Isle of MTV concert was free, but I didn’t go – nor did any of my friends. We also forget that there is a time and place for everything, including different types of music, and it is as difficult to get people in their teens and 20s to ‘appreciate’ opera as it is to get their parents and grandparents to appreciate anything that might be going on at the Isle of MTV.

Let me be honest here: if, at 20, I had met a man my age who liked opera and talked about it with passion, I would have run a mile, unless he had a reason for liking it in that he was involved himself (and even that would have been terribly off-putting). At this age, I obviously don’t see a love of opera as a sign of mental aberration or perversion in a person.

Now, the ones from whom I feel an urge to flee are contemporaries who try too hard by enthusing about the Isle of MTV concert and even – horrors – going there and standing packed in among the kids in their ‘hotpents’ (or maybe the hotpants are the reason they go in the first place).

And before somebody brings up the subject of free entrance to museums, which draws larger crowds, this is the answer: human psychology, again. People will go to a free exhibition out of curiosity because they are able to move around and know that they can leave after five minutes if they want to.

Yet they will not submit themselves to being trapped in a seat and unable to leave unless they are certain they are going to enjoy the experience.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.