大象传媒

Good morning.. I like cats. I like their semi-independence. They haven鈥檛 totally thrown in their lot with human beings. You have to work hard to earn their trust. What I don鈥檛 like is a cat鈥檚 capacity for gratuitous cruelty when hunting its prey, and I鈥檝e been following with interest some twitter correspondence seeking to explain this. One cat lover excuses the behaviour by saying that a cat is a relatively small animal and so as not to put itself at risk it must wear down a creature like a rat before killing it. 鈥淵es鈥�, say others, 鈥渂ut what about a field mouse or a butterfly or even a spider, there鈥檚 no danger to the cat with those and yet the cat still tortures them before killing.鈥�

Well perhaps this behaviour is instinctive and to be expected in cats, but in human beings? The papers have moved on from the report of the torture and murder of Daniel Pelka by his mother and her partner. That was yesterday鈥檚 news. But I believe that we shouldn鈥檛 move on, not yet. We all watched on our TV screens interviews with good and caring professionals in Coventry trying to explain how Daniel had fallen through the caring net. Daniel went through the hands of teachers, social workers, medics, police, and non of them spotted the root cause of his need - that he was being tortured to death by his carers. A senior police officer I thought, put his finger on the issue when he said, 鈥淣on of us thought the unthinkable.鈥� Well almost thirty years after the death of Jasmine Beckford, and ten years after the death of Victoria Climbie, surely it鈥檚 time that we did begin to think the unthinkable and recognize that adults are capable of gratuitous cruelty even to their own children...