A mother who killed her family cat by putting it in a washing machine was jauiled for six weeks yesterday.
Magistrates heard that Holly Thacker 34, put Fluffy in the machine on a boiling wash and then dumped the black cat’s body in the bin. The RSPCA was alerted after she told her ex-husband what she had done in front of her horrified daughters, then aged 15 and 5.
She told him: “The cat scratched me so I put it in the washing machine”. A vet said it would have taken up to 10 minutes for the cat to die, in which time it ‘must have been frightened and terrified’.
Thacker, a mother of three from Norwich, pleaded guilty to cruelty at a earlier hearing. She has also been banned from keeping pets for life.
Speaking after the case, RSPCA inspector Bob Mellor said: “In the seven years I have been working as an animal inspector, I have never come across anything as heartless as this. It was a deliberate act of cruelty and she knew the cat would die in the washing machine”.