I'm Eric, founder of I Love Every Dog, and I'm writing about four cats in the Town of Ontario, New York, that deputies say were left without food or water for 18 straight days in a home so filthy that investigators found trash, feces, and urine covering the floors. The woman responsible, Corinne Speights, now faces 148 counts of animal cruelty and abandonment. She is due in Ontario Town Court on October 27.
I'm asking Wayne County District Attorney Christine K. Callanan to prosecute all 148 counts and seek the maximum sentence available under New York law.
Eighteen days without food or water is not neglect that crept up on someone. It is a slow, deliberate abandonment that any reasonable person would have noticed and stopped within days, not weeks. Cats are quiet sufferers -- they don't bark for help the way a dog might -- and that silence is exactly why the people responsible for them have to be held to a real standard. Three of these cats were seized and handed to the Humane Society of Wayne County, which means they survived long enough to be saved. They deserve a prosecutor who treats their suffering as seriously as the numbers on the charging sheet suggest it should be.
148 charges is not a technicality or a prosecutor padding a docket. Each count represents a specific way this woman failed four defenseless animals who depended on her for the basics of survival. A plea deal that quietly reduces this to a handful of charges would tell every future offender in Wayne County that abandoning animals for weeks at a time carries little real risk.
Please join me in asking District Attorney Callanan to take this case to trial if necessary, to oppose any effort to minimize the charges, and to seek a sentence that reflects eighteen days of documented, ongoing cruelty.
