‘Anonymous’ Group Go Totally 4Chan on Cat Abuser

08/25/2010 3:00 pm by

4Chan’s Anonymous aren’t just for trolling Tom Cruise and his fellow Scis. They will also go nuclear on your ass if they find out you’re abusing cats.

Mere hours after boingboing posted a video of a middle-aged woman petting a cat and then tossing it in a nearby trash receptacle and closing the lid, the users of 4chan identified her as Mary Bale, 50, of Coventry, England. They also found her Facebook, her place of work, her boss’s name and phone number, tracked down her residence, and posted it all, including a Google map of her address. When they have a target, Anonymous don’t fuck around.

Here’s the video that sent Anonymous on Bale with their internetty pitchforks and torches (action starts about 0:22 in):

Considering that 4chan is responsible for lolcats, I suppose it’s not surprising that the trickster nerds of /b/ would come to the defense of a kitty. And, at first read, the cat lover in me wants to applaud Anonymous for tracking Bale down. However, at some point, my sense of justice kicks in. Since this sort of vigilante justice has an icky tendency to be a little unjust, what with the mob mentality and the lack of due process, someone innocent could easily be hurt, and someone guilty could receive a punishment far more severe than her crime. The furor created over that video led to death threats and other menacing comments that concerned police enough to place Bale under their protection.

mary bale coventry cat trasher e1282710777425 ‘Anonymous’ Group Go Totally 4Chan on Cat AbuserPlease don’t mistake me as defending Mary Bale. Her defense? “I don’t know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin.” Well, it didn’t. The cat, Lola, was found 15 hours after she was trashed, when her owner heard her meowing from inside the container. What if Lola’s owners had been away on vacation? Given what I could see from the footage, there wasn’t enough trash in the receptacle for the cat to have found her way out of there without her owner’s help. Hardeeharhar. Awesome joke, Mary Bale.

So, okay, in this case it sounds like this woman did indeed commit a boneheaded and cruel act that set an angry mob of cat lovers upon her, and while she sounds slightly regretful, she remains a little clueless as to why so many people were so upset: “I really don’t see what everyone is getting so excited about – it’s just a cat.”

But as angry as her actions and her cluelessness about their cruelty make me, enabling a massive, collective threat to ruin (or end) a woman’s life based on surveillance camera footage unaccompanied by sound or context is not okay. Good on Anonymous for tracking down an animal abuser—too many abusers go unpunished—but it should have ended with reporting Bale to police. You are legion, you are Anonymous, but you’re not friggin’ Batman.

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About Snarky Amber

Snarky Amber pursued a degree in interdisciplinary studies in order to obtain a well-rounded perspective, which she now uses to make fun of people who make more money in a week than she stands to make in a lifetime.

Filed Under: Caturday, Douchebags, Fail, Internet, Pop Britannia, Pop Culture, Teh Crazy, Teh Internets, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Video, WTF? Tagged With: , , , , , , ,


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  • JenGid

    So glad you had the follow up on what happened to the cat. That video did make me mad, but you have very valid points about how it should have been handled.

  • amber

    I’m 100% behind them. Cruel people are cowards. Ugly, disgusting, terrible cowards. I’m glad she gets a dose of her ugliness back in her face.

    • andy

      Are you looking at yourself in the mirror?

  • norm

    An anonymous tip to the local authorities would have been fine. This is just stupid. How’s that anti-Scientology thing going, guys? Nowhere? So you’re picking on someone who can’t fight back? Yeah, that figures.

  • Amanda

    Sure didn’t look like Mary Bale was throwing that cat in the trash for a laugh to me, what with the looking around to see if anyone was watching and the very quick exit she made after the fact, briskly walking away from the scene.

    What she did was despicable. Had it been one of my cats I would seek maximum punshiment.

    Honestly, Mary Bale seems like a bit of a sociopath to me. Wonder what other skeletons lurk within her closet. Not that I’m interested in the details, mind you, but I bet there’s something deeper. “Normal” people just don’t go throwing other people’s cats in trash cans. For reals.

  • http://yesimadethat.blogspot.com Lori

    Wow, I hadn’t seen the actual footage, just heard the uproar. While I don’t think total internet stalking and threats were called for, the cold, casual way she tossed the cat in there and then high-tailed it away make me think her “just a laugh” is a bit false. If it was for a laugh, she would have stuck around to see what the cat did. (not that I’m condoning putting cats in bins). Ick either way. (and I’m no great cat lover…)

  • Darla

    Um, I think I agree with the possible sociopath comment. In the video she pets the cat, looks around (quite subtly-like a pick-pocket would), and then promptly tosses the cat into the bin and leaves. I could be watching too much CSI and other crime shows of the like, but my conclusion is that she enjoyed “befriending” it, then exercising some power over it. Sick. Very Sick.

    Now, I DO NOT condone vigilante action here. That just makes human kind as bad as the perp. I do think she needs to be charged with the highest level of crime to animals possible.

  • andrew

    she thought her anonymous hate would go unpunished, and its been pounced on and throw back at her 10 fold by anonymous hate. aaah the poetry of life.

  • http://www.memoriesgrow.com MemoriesGrow

    Clearly she did an undefensible act of cruelty. I don’t condone vigilantism, but I think what 4Chan did up to a point was fine (except posting her boss’s phone number and her residence – esp with a map). I understand their anger, but identifying her residence is going too far and risks some other sicko upping the violence.

  • jen

    I don’t want the “lady” dead, but she does need to be punished. Anonymous is not Batman, they are the Punisher!

  • http://sleepymel.wordpress.com/ Mel

    I agree with not wanting her physically hurt or dead, but what she did was terrible and deserves punishment. She should definitely be punished by the law, but I think she should also be subjected to a degree of the public backlash – she needs to hear that people think she’s a terrible person and I hope it does make her life inconvenient for a while.

    I also think she should be locked in a trash bin for 15 hours and see how funny she finds it then.

  • http://twitter.com/forever_trust Paula

    Karma, baby

  • http://www.richtapestries.com Suzie B

    Mary Bale the cat lady reminds me of one of Bladerunner’s replicants – right after the ‘entre of boiled dog’ question in the Voight-Kampff test, "You find a cat alone in the street. You pet it, and then what?"

  • Jenn

    I think Mary needs to see a psychiatrist. She is obviously not quite right-in-the-head. But the kind of intense search-and-destroy tactics of Anonymous are no more compassionate or humane than her treatment of the cat. What if turned out that she was mentally disabled? Or what if someone had carried out one of the many death threats that resulted from Anon’s outing of her personal stats? True that regardless of her motivation or mental state she did something cruel and despicable. And she should have to answer to that. But just because the incident was caught on film and put on the Internet, does that mean she has to answer to the entire Internet?

    To be honest, this whole episode smacks of the kind of mob-mentality cyber-bullying that I worry about my pre-teen daughters getting caught up in or, gawd-forbid, becoming victims of. *shudder*

  • G.G.R

    Ugh!!! What a horrible woman! I hope she is mentally disabled some way, because to think that there are ‘normal’ people out there that do such a thing is just… awful. Makes me feel sick. That poor cat. Poor cats owners.

    If anyone did that to one of my cats I would open a can. I once protected Lilly from a dog trying to eat her and got all sorts of fucked up from it (turns out dogs have teeth!)- I can take a human. I don’t know if I would necessarily get violent (unless my cats were under a direct threat of pain or… worse), or if there would just be a lot of yelling and in-your-faceness. I am sure I would try to squeeze a slap in the face in there at least.

    This makes me angry, as perhaps you can see.

    Maybe next time that woman won’t do something that people find so disgusting that they post her name, address and boss’ number on the internet. An eye for an eye, a dumpster death threat for internet death threats.

  • Anoneemouse

    HAHA good job /b/rothers! Once again another animal abuser met their match through our loyal brotherhood. You would think after Kenny Glenn got his pathetic life turned upside down due to anon’s efforts that the rest of teh world would learn not to mess with the kittehs. All you dinks that are screaming that “it’s just a cat” just imagine if that was your child’s pet and some frumpy chump like Bale made your children think that their beloved pet had run away or had died… all for the sake of a “joke”? Screw her, and screw you.

  • kate

    I would be sad and angered if this happened to my cat. I would maybe want to have a few words with this woman, but I would never wish on her the harm that 4chan can cause to people. They are a like an angry beehive, no reasoning, they just sting.