Galina Finklestein, 61 years old, from Rishon Le Zion is a sworn cat lover. She is raising a cat at home, and is consistently feeding the cats that live in the street in her neighborhood. The cats have become part of her daily routine, but nothing could have prepared her for what happened, on what seemed to be a perfectly normal day.
She heard the loud howling of cats in the street, and Galina assumed innocently that the cats were playing and amusing themselves or maybe fighting amongst themselves. What she was about to see would never have occurred to her. When she went down to the yard to feed the cats, a frightening sight was revealed to her eyes: two kittens, which she was in the habit of feeding, were dead after there heads were smashed into a wall. The blood of the kittens was splattered everywhere, and the mother cat was standing by their bodies and howling helplessly.
The enraged Galina contacted the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Israel and found it hard to describe what had happened. Representatives of the Society who arrived at the scene instructed Galina to speak to the police and to file a complaint about the criminal deed. Galina even contacted the office of the mayor of Rishon Le Zion, but got no response to this terrible occurrence.
According to Galina, one of the neighbors threatened her in the past saying that he would destroy the cats that she feeds, and even her husband testified that the time that the howling was heard was when that particular neighbor would go off to work every day. The police told Galina that the complaint would be investigated, but in the days following the filing of the complaint not even one policeman showed up at the site. This shocking occurrence is the latest in the chain of abusive incidents against animals, which does not gain serious consideration by the police. Almost weekly we receive complaints about abuse of animals. However, the police does not take action and does not do enough to investigate each incident. We are of the opinion that this criminal contempt of animals cannot be tolerated by society. It is not possible that individuals will carry out shocking crimes against animals and the authorities will remain indifferent to these acts. Animals are not able to raise their voices in protest, but we, who give them a voice, demand a stern response. We are sure that only when the police will begin to take action to investigate, and the courts will mete out true justice and will begin to convict and to punish, then the public will understand that for every action there are also consequences. Until then the animals are in real danger, and are easy targets for those who think that everything is permissible and that they won’t have to pay for their actions.
