LONDON — A UK judge on Monday sentenced two 17-year-old teenagers — a boy and a girl — respectively to one year and nine months in detention for the “sadistic” torture and killing of two kittens.
The boy had also wanted to kill a human and researched how to “get away with murder”, according to the prosecutor.
Two kittens were found cut open with ropes attached to them in a park in northwest London in May.
Both kittens had pieces of flesh and fur apparently burned off them. Police also found knives, blowtorches and scissors at the scene.
The two teenagers pleaded guilty to possessing a knife and causing unnecessary suffering to the animals. Neither can be named for legal reasons.
District judge Hina Rai said the killings were “without doubt the most awful offences against animals I have seen in this court”.
The boy’s actions were “extensively planned” and “clearly premeditated”, said the judge, sentencing him to 12 months in a youth detention centre.
“I really wanted to murder someone. Every day I was researching how to get away with murder,” read notes found on the boy’s phone. “I have killed cats to reduce my urges.”
His actions “showed a degree of planning” in “finding the animals, taking them to a public place and killing them in such a sadistic manner”, prosecutor Valerie Benjamin told the court.
He told police he suffered from “depression, anxiety, hallucinations and self-harm”, the prosecutor added.
The girl, sentenced to nine months in a detention centre, had downloaded images of badly mutilated kittens in the months before the killings, the court heard.
“It is not clear who took the lead but from what I have read you were both equally responsible,” said the judge.
According to the BBC, UK police are investigating possible links to a wider international network of online users who share and film footage of cats being tortured or killed.
The British animal welfare charity RSPCA told AFP that they had recorded a 42 percent increase in reports of cat cruelty between 2021 and 2024, from 1,435 to 2,041.
The charity also observed a 27 percent increase in reports of posts depicting animal cruelty on social media since the beginning of the year, with 133 reports in May compared to 104 from the same period last year.