In short:
British backpacker Bradley Gavin Knoesen, 31, has pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges in Western Australia.
Knoesen, who is in Australia on a working holiday visa, drowned a kelpie before beating it to death.
What’s next?
Knoelsen has avoided an immediate jail term but is likely to be deported from Australia.
drowned a kelpie before beating it to death
This isn’t a typo - he did actually drown the dog, he then revived her (the dog, a 1 year old puppy) and beat her to death with a beer bottle.
It seems the dog didn’t even do anything wrong to annoy him or anything - he apparently did all this to get at the dog’s owner, saying “I want [the dog’s owner] to see what happened to his precious dog.”
It seems crazy to give him a suspended sentence for this. Completely psychopathic behaviour to an innocent and defenceless puppy.
We still live in a world where even our accepted pet species are treated as less than property by many global societies. IDK the specifics of Australian animal laws, but that’s the only guess I can muster, especially if they don’t even feel compelled to view an Australian Kelpie with more regard.
Not that it excuses the act, but I’m leaning on the side of “normal guy who absolutely just lost it one day” rather than “actual psycho who has secretly tortured animals all his life”. I do wonder what was going through his mind. Poor fucking dog…
Idk man, i only just heard about this from this article, but just reading through the article I can’t imagine anyone I would consider normal drowning, beating to death, then tying the dead puppy to the back of a motorcycle and dragging it through the wilderness. The article says alcohol was involved so I’d put my money on this guy being a violent piece of shit to begin with
Yeah I can’t imagine any amount of alcohol being enough to make me brutally murder my dog. That just doesn’t track.
Yeah. I guess I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt because he otherwise sounds normal. But you’re right that it’s hard to imagine any extreme situation that would drive someone to prolong a murder like that.
because he otherwise sounds normal
I’m not an expert on people who are capable of committing crimes like this, but I know that masking is a big part of why people are able to get away with seeming ‘normal’.
Alcohol does not drive people to do this. To suggest that it’s somehow capable of completely obliterating a mask that’s been kept up 100% up until that point is also unrealistic, at least in my eyes. Now if there were other drugs, maybe something like PCP - there’s a discussion to be had there.
Drugs could be it. I’m also thinking a manic episode, where you don’t know what’s real but are consumed by one irrational thought that made sense at the time
