Dogs and cats are the most popular pets in the United States.
There are 45.3 million households in America that have at least one cat.
And police officers were floored when they found out why this Florida man waterboarded and tortured his cat.
Pets are a big part of life in the United States.
Even though there is a wide range of different types of pets, dogs and cats are by far the most common to own.
As “man’s best friend,” virtually all people love dogs.
But it is amazing how many cat lovers there are in the world.
The International Cat Association recognizes 73 different breeds of cats.
Overall, there are roughly 82 million pet cats in the United States.
Petpedia, a website that offers information and advice on various pets, estimates that 45.3 million households in the United States have at least one cat.
This is roughly 26% of all households in America.
According to HumanePro, the COVID pandemic led to a 40% increase in cat ownership in the United States.
But one Florida man will never be allowed to own a cat for the rest of his life after police caught him torturing them.
Deputies from the Palm Bay Police Department recently responded to a domestic call.
Once on the scene, the officers found 18-year-old Kieran McKinney and the person he had gotten into an altercation with.
The altercation occurred after they discovered McKinney had committed an act of animal cruelty.
“This guy has just been going off on a cat at the house,” Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey explained. “Most of the time, it was in retaliation for different events that were going on,” he continued. “In one of them, he grabbed the cat and literally threw it on a couch.”
“In the Palm Bay case, he grabbed the cat, threw it off the third-floor balcony, across the parking lot into an empty lot and broke its leg,” Ivey added.
According to Sheriff Ivey, the Florida man even waterboarded his cat as a form of punishment.
“He actually put the cat in its carrier where it couldn’t get out, couldn’t escape, and took a water hose to it, on three different times, and sprayed it into the cage, just torturing this poor cat,” Ivey said.
Sheriff Ivey also said McKinney withheld food and water from the cat because it “had an accident.”
He was “just torturing this poor cat,” Ivey said. “There’s no other way for me to frame it, except he likes to beat up cats.”
McKinney will not be torturing cats at any point in the near future.
He was arrested and charged with three counts of aggravated animal cruelty and one count of animal confinement without food or water.
“We’re about to walk a sorry individual into our jail for animal cruelty,” Sheriff Ivey can be heard saying in a video of the officers escorting McKinney from a patrol car into the police station.
As he shut the door on McKinney, Sheriff Ivey said “that’s the sound of justice.”
“I would love to treat you just like you treated this cat, but the law keeps me from doing that,” Ivey said. “Just like it should’ve kept you from doing it.”
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
