Aussie man gets 100 hours community service for biting head off a rat & posting footage on Facebook
Recent viral videos on cruelty to animal incidents usually involve female teenagers. However, in Australia, it was a 24-year-old man from Brisbane who was found by a court to be guilty of animal cruelty for biting the head off a rat and posting the video on social media.
News.com.au reports that Matthew Clement Maloney pleaded guilty to inflicting unnecessary pain to a domestic rat in Albion in January. As a result, a Brisbane Magistrate Suzette Coates banned Maloney from owning a pet for three years and sentenced him to 100 hours of community service.
The post on Facebook was reported which led to RSPCA inspectors’ raid on Maloney’s house in January. But outside the court, which found Maloney’s behaviour as “rabid, narcissistic (and) attention-seeking, the electrician insists what he did was not that bad. “There’s a lot of worse stuff you could’ve done – buy a rat poison, rat traps.”
Yahoo News reports that the animal welfare group confiscated from Maloney’s house a pet snake and surviving rats. But the man defended his biting off the feeder rat’s head since he was really going to kill the rodent and feed it to his pet snake.
In a Facebook post, he wrote in January, “The rat in the video was a feeder rat and was always going to die. I fed the body to my snake after the video and it wasn’t wasted.” But Maloney has apparently quit Facebook.
After biting the rat’s head, Maloney drank three shots of vodka. Then someone enters the room and hits Maloney in the face, while a third person breaks a chair on Maloney’s back. It was a new social media challenge.
But Nick Dore, Maloney’s lawyer, explains his client’s behaviour to a melanoma diagnosis which caused the accused “a significant degree of ridicule and embarrassment.” However, the magistrate says despite the destabilising news about Maloney’s health, only a “silly idiot” would bite off a rat’s head and post it on social media which Coates says is an attention-seeking behaviour.”
VIDEO: ‘Mad’ man defends sickening footage biting off rat’s head
