"Animal cruelty” is not one category.

Special animal crimes include cases that are more organized, more hidden, more serial, and more connected to broader violence than the public wants to admit—especially sexualized animal abuse and zoosadism, which are often stigmatized into silence and mishandled through discomfort, denial, or lack of specialized training.

Yesterday, I had the honor of remotely collaborating with a small but dedicated group of people in Australia to live-tweet the sentencing of Adam Robert Corden Britton. Britton is a disgraced zoologist who pled guilty of 56 offenses related to the torture, sexual abuse, and murder of Animals. He was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, with a minimum of six served and is prohibited from purchasing, acquiring or taking possession of a mammal for the rest of his natural life.