Coffeeking, please refrain from calling me a moron, and I’ll refrain from calling you an irrational hysteric. 🙂
In my mind, there is a difference between people and other animals. I eat animals, I do not eat people. I condone the castration of dogs, I object to the enforced sterilisation of proles. I accept that old racehorses can be shot, I do not much care for the same treatment of pensioners. I endorse the forcible shaving of enslaved sheep to make my clothing, I oppose the enslavement and forcible shaving of people for any purpose.
Animals are things we use, for amusement, for food, to do work that is too tiresome for people to do etc etc etc. The cat is admittedly not a very useful animal, but people apparently like having them around, and they alarm some sorts of vermin. But they are not people. (that is all, incidentally, I mean by cats not having souls. I have no idea whether they do or not. I believe the catholic church thinks they do not.)
I agree, we have drawn a series of arbitrary lines around what can and cannot be done to animals and for what reasons. Putting a cat in a microwave is clearly pointless and absurd cruelty. It serves no useful purpose. (If it did we would permit it. As Simon says, animals of equal sentience are treated equally badly as long as we intend to eat them). We protect people from being put in microwaves because they are people, they are assumed to have equal worth based on their common humanity and they have the right to life, protected by the state. We protect cats from being put in the microwave because we dislike the idea that cats are being put in microwaves, not because they are people.
This chap did a bad thing. He accepts he did a bad thing, and has pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges. He has been given a substantial community sentence, and has been banned from owning pets (although not as far as I can see from owning a farm). Justice, in its small way has been done. Justice would be well over-done, to the point of not being justice, if stupid young men who killed cats were themselves put to death.
If he had put a baby in the microwave for the purpose of seeing it die that would, to my mind, be worse than putting a cat in a microwave. Anyone seriously disagree with that statement? 😯