The general outrage over Mary Bale, who for no apparent reason put a cat in a wheelie bin, where it remained for 16 hours, mewing piteously, is a very extraordinary phenomenon. Of course, she shouldn’t have done it. But this isn’t just a story about someone being cruel to an animal; after all, it wasn’t really actually monstrously cruel, only moderately so.
No, there is something more to all this; we need more of an explanation for this nine days wonder, for the hundreds of thousands of hits on the YouTube footage (the whole episode having been captured on the private CCTV of the cat’s owners). Why are we all so fascinated? Because, I suspect, we still have no answer to the big question: why did she do it?
