A 40-year-old man has been convicted of ill-treating two sheep after he killed them with the intention of eating them for dinner.
Jeremy Phillip Clark, of Otago, personally slaughtered the sheep with a knife on Christmas Day last year, and says he just wanted to make himself some “nice chops on the barbeque.”
But the judge who convicted Clark has condemned him, saying the manner in which he took their lives was “brutal and inhumane,” and if he really wanted to eat a sheep, he would wait for it to be packaged and sent to a supermarket, so that both he and society as a whole could be sufficiently removed from the situation so as not to feel morally culpable.
“The way in which you crudely used a blunt instrument to slit the throats of those sheep so that you might cook and consume their flesh is sick and disturbing in the extreme,” said Judge John MacDonald, who went on to explain how Clark could have killed the sheep humanely by breeding them together in close quarters before systematically leading them, one by one, to death at the hands of expensive farming equipment.
“If you are going to kill and eat a sheep, you must be respectful of the law and do so correctly,” MacDonald said. “You must fence them in, breed them, take away their young and slaughter them at six weeks for the sake of a delicacy.”
The family who witnessed the killing of the sheep said they were pleased to see that Clark would be sentenced, saying they were horrified to think that someone could hold sheep captive for years, take their wool, slaughter them, murder their young, and not do it quickly.