An almost unbelievable case of animal cruelty is being heard at the Klagenfurt Regional Court. An ‘alternative’ landlady is said to have neglected her highland cattle and Mangalitza pigs so badly that some animals starved and died of thirst from their frozen excrement on freezing winter nights.
“How do you handle these photos?” judge Michaela Sanin wants to know from the livestock farmer from the St. Veit area and shows her photos of dirty, starving, matted and neglected highland cattle and Mangalitza pigs lying on frozen feces. They are dead, but the woman is sitting very relaxed in the dock. This isn’t the first time she’s heard of being accused of animal cruelty. “What should I say when the animals lie down in the mud? We have done everything necessary. “That was our family,” she claims mercilessly. And in general, these breeds need to be hardened and kept “close to nature”.
Official vet shocked
“This alternative attitude combined with extreme ignorance has led to the image of misery,” says the official veterinarian, still bewildered by the conditions prevailing on the small farm. And apparently still prevail, even though the living conditions of the animals have changed by “The many checks and reports have improved. Because there is still no ban on keeping animals. And just a few days before the trial on Wednesday, the veterinarian again determined that the woman’s pigs were “poor pigs” in the true sense of the word: “I just don’t understand why you do that,” he says. “The pain threshold for your animals is very high!”
It remains to be seen how high the judge’s pain threshold is when determining the sentence, because the new allegations need to be investigated and therefore the proceedings have been postponed for the time being. Theoretically, the German-born woman, who has run several farms over the years, faces a prison sentence of up to two years. In practice, animal rights activists repeatedly criticize the fact that the punishments for animal abusers are almost always very mild.
Source: Krone
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