How could anyone find this vile act amusing?

MOWING down emus for a video is brutal and senseless, but violent threats aren’t the answer. We must change how we deal with animal abuse in order to stop it, writes Paul Williams.

IT’S difficult to know where to begin when trying to reconcile the vile madness of a young man who found it amusing to mow down emus with his car.

On the one hand, there’s the sheer nauseating ugliness of anyone who, for one reason or another, has become wholly insensitive to randomly inflicting pain and death on fellow sentient beings.

On the other, this 20 year old man (a kid in many ways), who has been charged over the incident, now appears remorseful — “It’s the biggest stuff up of my life,” he said — and has suffered his own threats of violence from a rightly appalled general public.

Back to the first hand: this was not a case of minor neglect by an aged owner perhaps afflicted by depression.

This was the deliberate and repeated killing of emus — half of Australia’s Coat of Arms and noble native birds occupying this land for millennia before Europeans — in a brutal fashion for perverse personal gratification. Moreover, the filming of that video with “mates” adds a sharper, darker edge to the whole offence. More on that later.

The 20-year-old said in a television interview that while he initially thought the killing of emus was funny, he later realised it was a “stuff up”. Picture: Seven News

Back to the second hand: threatening this young bloke with violence is almost as abominable as his own crime, and certainly does nothing to increase this fellow’s desire to genuinely atone for his wrongdoing and be re-accepted by the community.

And therein lies the conundrum. Exactly what does society do with animal abusers who are often young and easily led?

As a passionate animal lover — I often find the company of loving pets preferable to some self-interested souls — I’ve long struggled with this question. Indeed, I once believed prison to be the only acceptable punishment for all cases of animal cruelty.

Now I’m not so sure. While incarceration should surely be meted out to repeat abusers, young first-time offenders are hardly going to emerge from prison as better adjusted human beings.

The alternative answer, as always, is education. But educating marginalised folk with a grudge against society is a costly business. Far too often, public education around animal rights, native animal rescue and the investigation of animal abuse falls to a single community group: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) — the Salvation Army of the animal kingdom operating in this country without fuss or fanfare for almost 150 years.

Worryingly, the RSPCA survives on a shoestring budget and the altruism of an army of volunteers. With Australian governments funding just 3 per cent of its revenue, the RSPCA has little choice. The other 97 per cent comes from private donations, with 60 per cent willed by deceased Australians — a noble gesture if there ever was.

Stills from the video footage shared on social media showed a man deliberately running down a mob of emus in his car. Picture: Facebook

The blunt reality is that, without a well-resourced RSPCA, native and domestic animals cannot be saved, and animal cruelty cannot be properly investigated (and offenders prosecuted) without the paid services of professionals.

Enter our state and federal governments which must invest more to save our animal friends — the quietly dignified creatures who labour on farms, suffer medical experiments, provide food and clothing to millions and, of course, offer love and companionship to all who ask for it. And what do they humbly ask in return? Some nourishing food, warm and dry lodgings, a little personal attention and a basic freedom from cruelty.

In short, while it’s all well and good for governments to talk up increased penalties for offenders — see the recent law and order rhetoric around the strawberry tamperer — state and federal governments must lift their financial support for groups like the RSPCA which can save and rehabilitate animals in the short-term, and for public education programs which can prevent all types of anti-social behaviour in the long-term.

This returns us to the question of “mates”. I’ve often wondered why governments don’t invest in basic public education programs (perhaps through low-cost viral videos for Millennials) to encourage young folk — so often anxious to stand out from the crowd — to think for oneself and ignore the peer pressure of their dodgy “mates”.

Developing such a culture not only discourages the sharing of videos celebrating bullying, hooning and animal abuse (all committed in a nauseating attempt to ingratiate themselves with yobbos), but also cultivate a resistance to peer pressure in drug and alcohol use and petty crime.

Culture can be changed, but only when governments get behind that change. In the interim, this week I’m going to donate to the RSPCA. I ask you to do the same.

Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer at Griffith University’s School of Humanities and a columnist for The Courier-Mail.