I really hate it when I start the week with stories like the one that follows, and I hope it doesn’t ruin the rest of the week for you. I highly recommend going over and looking at some cute dog pictures when you finish, just to recharge your batteries a bit.
Usually, we call people who do bad or stupid stuff to dogs “boneheads,” but that’s just too cute and coy a way to describe Jacky Lo. He goes straight into Doggie Douchebag territory.
Lo seized international fame two weeks ago when he posted a video to Facebook showing a small white puppy struggling to get out of a washing machine as it is buffeted back and forth by the wash cycle. Lo called it “A super quick way to wash a dog: Soak, clean and dry. All done. Clean and quick!” When someone asked if the dog had died, he responded with glee: “Yes (it’s dead). Do you wanna see?”
Lo became an Internet meme of the kind that makes me want to take a blowtorch to my cerebellum, just to burn the though of him away. The good part is that over 20,000 people signed a petition asking the Hong Kong government to bring him to justice. Under Hong Kong law, animal cruelty can be punished by up to three years in prison and a fine of HK$200,000. (About 25,800 in US dollars.) While it seems that Lo has enjoyed the notoriety from the video, gleefully taunting the people who condemn him, he posted that he was going back to mainland China to avoid the charges.
After all that, Lo has decided to turn everything up a notch. Last Friday, he posted that he has six stray dogs, and he’s going to kill one every week. “I will ask a question every seven days,” he wrote. “I will kill a dog if your answer is wrong. The fate of the dogs will depend on you.”
Will Lo follow through on his twisted version of Jeopardy? It’s hard to tell. He seems to really enjoy the notoriety of being a sadistic dog abuser, but there’s no proof that he actually has the dogs that he’s threatening to kill. For that matter, the fate of the original dog is uncertain, although it’s not unlikely that it died in the washer. What we do know is that Lo is quite willing to indulge in cruelty against dogs and brag about it.
Already, I can imagine people wanting to blame this display of cruelty on the Internet. Everything is the Internet’s fault, after all. Jacky Lo — if that’s his real name — may get a bigger audience for his sadism because of the Internet, but it wasn’t caused by it. Just from writing for Dogster every day, I know that people’s capacity for cruelty transcends the imagination with or without social media. The one bit of good news to come out of this is that Lo’s bragging in the public square has allowed people to pressure the Hong Kong officials to take action. Here’s hoping that he’ll be apprehended before he hurts any more dogs.
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