NATCHEZ — Oscar has every right to be grouchy.

After all, the 6-month-old puppy was literally thrown away by his original owners.

A maintenance worker at Village Green Apartments found and removed the chihuahua from the complex’s Dumpster a month ago.

The animal, confined to its carrier, was starving and dehydrated.

Since then Oscar, named for Oscar the Grouch of Sesame Street fame, has been nursed back to health and adopted by a loving family.

He’s one of the lucky ones.

Craig and Suzanne Barrows adopted Oscar, and Suzanne said she can’t imagine the mind set of any individual that would throw a dog out like garbage.

“There is no way we can figure it out,” she said. “It’s so foreign to us that someone would treat an animal like trash.”

The unthinkable crime

Natchez Police Sgt. Craig Godbold said police investigate an animal cruelty case every couple of months, and Vidalia Police Chief Ronnie G. “Tapper” Hendricks said animal cruelty cases are “not uncommon.”

“We have worked cases where dogs have been abandoned and left to die, where someone moves and leaves a residence where they just left the dogs chained up,” Godbold said. “Nobody knew the dog was there until it was too late.”

Natchez-Adams Humane Society board member Nan Garrison said though many of the cases the humane society sees deal with extreme failure to feed animals, it is not uncommon to come across dogs that have been used for fighting, beaten, shot or scalded with hot liquid.

While Garrison said it’s difficult to have a concept of exactly what motivates animal abusers, groups like the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals spend a great deal of time trying to find out what makes animal abusers tick.

Randall Lockwood, who is senior vice president of the ASPCA anti-cruelty field services, said animal abusers don’t always have a shared background in common.

“It cuts across race, class and education,” Lockwood said.

Abuse by violence

In categorizing violent animal abusers, nearly 95 percent of the time they’re young males who have a need to establish power or who are dealing with feelings of disenfranchisement, Lockwood said.

“They’re essentially bullies,” he said.

While Lockwood said most violent abusers are young men or adolescents, it’s not uncommon to see much older men engaging in the same type of behavior.

And while there’s a fairly solid profile of those abusing animals, why they choose to harm them is not totally clear, Lockwood said.

“That’s the big question,” he said.

Lockwood said in many cases when he has interviewed young abusers, they simply say they were bored when they committed the act.

However, Lockwood said, boredom does not account for abuse.

“They may not have the insight to see that it empowers them,” he said. “Or they could be reacting to their own victimization.”

But to add to the mystery of why abuse is viewed as an option, not all abusers are themselves victims of abuse.

What is clear is that many animal abusers go on to more serious crimes later in life.

Lockwood said animal abusers are almost five times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes against people, four times more likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes and three times more likely to be arrested for crimes against property.

“They’re the people we need to be concerned about,” he said.

However, it’s not always easy to establish patterns of offenders since court records for most juveniles are sealed or expunged, Lockwood said.

Abuse by neglect

Lockwood said men and women are equally guilty of abuse by neglect.

In many cases ignorance or overwhelming financial problems culminate in neglect, he said.

However, in some instance the abuse is a passive aggressive form of hurting a family member via the family pet.

Lockwood said it is not uncommon to find a husband or boyfriend that has prevented a family member from feeding a pet or allowing the pet to get medical attention as a means of hurting another family member.

“Their neglect has an intentional component,” he said.

In the case of Oscar, Lockwood said it’s not easy to pinpoint the exact situation that led to the dog’s disposal.

Veterinarians that treated Oscar said the dog had already suffered from neglect pointing to the dog’s dehydration, emaciation and heart worms.

But to put the dog in the carrier and throw it away took thought and effort.

“Bad decisions were made at multiple points,” Lockwood said. “That points to intent.”

And it is intent that is often considered when police decide whether or not to prosecute an animal cruelty case.

Recently, during the course of his routine patrols, the Vidalia animal control officer noticed something out of the ordinary about a yard with several pit bull puppies in it.

“Something in that yard didn’t look right,” Hendricks said. “He got out of the vehicle, walked up and looked and could tell that the chains on the dogs weighed more than the dogs did.”

The puppies were thin, malnourished and exposed to the elements.

Giving the owners the benefit of the doubt, Hendricks said the police gave them three days to get the animals adequate food, water, shelter and veterinary care.

Three days later, that hadn’t happened and the police confiscated the animals and took them to a veterinarian for treatment.

“Hopefully, someone will want to adopt them and take care of them,” Hendricks said.

“It’s a shame that people get these animals thinking they will take care of it, and they just kind of forget about them. Before someone gets a pet, they really ought to consider — do I have proper housing? Will I be home to take care of it?”

Stopping the abuse

The solution to animal abuse is not easy to find, but Natchez-Adams Humane Society Director Pat Cox said it starts with children.

“Education is the main thing, and something we would like to do in the future is try to get it to the younger ones and start teaching them how to care for an animal and what’s required when you start taking responsibility of a pet,” she said.

Cox said children need to grow up knowing that taking care of a pet is like taking care of a child. A pet needs health care, food and water and needs to be taken care of every single day — not just when the owner feels like it.

“The sooner you get it to them in the lower grades and press on them responsibility and care, that’s when you can really make an impression on them,” she said.

As most of the abuse in the area comes from sheer negligence, Cox said other programs could be instilled in the future if the humane society’s budget and staff were to grow.

Cox would like to have a program that assisted owners struggling financially with obtaining food for their animals.

“I wish to God we had that capability right now, but we don’t,” Cox said.

Cox said she would still rather see pet owners bring their animals to the humane society if they can’t feed them.

“We would much rather see them brought to us, even if they have to be euthanized,” she said.