Cape Town school under fire after viral animal cruelty videos emerge

Over the past week, distressing videos portraying animal cruelty have been circulating on social media.

One depicts a young boy, approximately 13 or 14 years old, brutally assaulting a cat.

In the other, a leopard toad is affixed to a soft drink bottle and launched into the sky using a firework rocket.

What compounds the shock is not only the barbarity of these acts but also the involvement of multiple perpetrators – other children can be observed or heard laughing in the background, some even handling the cameras that recorded both incidents.

Both videos seem to have been recorded in Cape Town, involving students from local schools, and have gained wide dissemination within the community.

Pieterse emphasises that the misconception prevailing among people is that animal cruelty is confined to rural areas, a notion he finds far from reality.

He notes that despite reaching out to the Southern Suburb school for information regarding the children depicted in the video, he has not received any acknowledgment or communication.

This absence of response leads him to ponder whether the school is genuinely committed to addressing this grave issue.

Pieterse points out that both incidents underscore a disturbing lack of empathy among children and highlight a troubling trend of animal mistreatment.

He raises concerns about what might be happening behind closed doors at home to normalise such behaviour.