A quick Google search says that there are about 78 million dogs and 86 million cats in America- a vast number of people are pet owners. So there's reason to believe most of us are also animal lovers. Unfortunately you get the oddball sometimes who has a pet but probably shouldn't, the kind of people who are, for lack of a better word, awful. Just awful, terrible, no good pet owners. Like these people.
Tattoo Pooch
Taking care of your pet when it's sick is paramount to good pet ownership, and hand in hand with that is doing your best to prevent your pet from falling ill. But all of this has to exist not only within reason, but within what you might call common sense. You have to know what you're doing before you do it. This was not the case with Emerson Damasceno.
Damasceno, a tattoo artist from Brazil, posted pictures of his Bull Terrier online that quickly sparked outrage. Why? The dog in the pictures had a tattoo on its shaved snout, near its eyes and on its ears.
Damasceno claimed, after people complained about the photos, that a local veterinary school had told him tattoos would help prevent his dog from getting cancer. The school had to issue a statement saying they never said that to Damasceno or anyone else because it makes no sense at all. Damasceno later deleted his social media accounts and vanished, but not before the pictures had been widely shared and condemned.
Whether or not police got involved in the case, or if the photos are legit or a hoax, was not made clear. But whatever the case, it didn't earn Damasceno any fans.
Chihua-whoa!
Isaiah Nathanial Sais sounds like a responsible pet owner when you first hear about him. Concerned about his chihuahua Jack Sparrow having seizures and convulsions, he took the little fella to a veterinarian in Southern California. And that's about as far as his responsible pet ownership goes because, as the vet soon learned, the reason the dog was in such a poor state was because it had eaten meth. How did the dog get meth? Sais had just left it around the house.
Since the vet couldn't be sure what was wrong with the dog, they did a quick drug screening. When the test came back positive for methamphetamine the vet confronted Sais, who immediately declined treatment for Jack and took off.
Animal Services soon came calling and removed Jack from the home, noting the dog's nails had clearly not been trimmed in ages and he smelled of urine, indicating he'd probably not been outside in quick a while and was severely neglected.
Little Jack was taken back to a vet and received emergency treatment, while Sais was arrested.
Marinating On It
Gary Korkuc had adopted his cat Navarro from the Erie County SPCA, after the organization had determined Korkuc would offer the neutered male a decent home. Fast forward a couple of months to the time police stop Korkuc for running a stop sign and hear meowing in his trunk.
Upon investigating, the officer found Navarro, covered in oil, salt and spices in a cage. Korkuc was marinating the cat with the intention of eating it on the grounds that it was mean to him. According to Korkuc the cat was greedy and wasteful and had just miscarried an entire litter of kittens. It was a neutered male, don't forget.
Later Korkuc changed his story saying he never intended to eat the cat, he was just taking it back to the SPCA at the very moment police pulled him over. Why was it caged in the trunk covered in marinade? That part wasn't clear.
Luckily for Navarro, he was rescued, bathed at the SPCA and adopted out to a new owner who isn't the sort of person who would marinate a cat in the trunk.
The Pig Eaters
When it comes to adopting an animal from the SPCA, it seems like the sort of thing you're only going to do if you're really committed to wanting to care for an animal. After all, the SPCA rescues these animals and then vets the potential adopters – you have to sign a contract and agree to take care of the animal, which implies a level of caring, right?
When the British Columbia SPCA rescued a bunch of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, it seemed like things were going great with the re-homing effort with a number of people signing up to adopt the pigs. And then things took a bad turn.
One pig, named Molly, was adopted by a family, who signed a contract and everything, promising to take care of her. A week later, the SPCA learned the pig had been slaughtered and eaten by the family. They clearly had no intent on taking care of the pig as a pet, instead they'd stumbled on a cheap way to get pork.
The SPCA blacklisted the family and are no longer able to ever adopt an animal, but no charges will be filed as the animal was slaughtered humanely according to law, and violating an SPCA contract isn't an actionable offense.
McKitty
The most important part of pet ownership is, at its core, actually owning the pet. If you don't have possession, you're not taking care of it and that, in turn, means the poor critter has to care for itself. That was the case with a cat named Frankie in Australia whose owners left him when he was just a kitten.
Frankie, left to his own devices, moved into the McDonald's parking lot near his former home and managed to survive on the scraps people tossed him from the drive-thru. For a full year Frankie lived off of French fries, McNuggets and bits of burger thrown to him, until McDonalds employees began to grow concerned about his health. A year of just McDonalds is, after all, not a good diet for a cat.
The SPCA was called and they picked up Frankie, discovering that switching him to an actually nutritious diet was no easy task since he'd become fairly addicted to fast food. But eventually they turned him around and got him healthy and happy again, no thanks to the negligent owners who left the poor guy behind.
