A 22-year-old man has been jailed for the “gleeful and sadistic” torture and killing of a kangaroo in Australia.
Dylan Leslie Griffin pleaded guilty to punching the animal with knuckledusters before shooting it in the eye.
He was sentenced to 11 months in prison. He is the third man to be sentenced in the shocking case.
After the judgement was handed down, violence broke out outside Joondalup Magistrates Court, Perth.
Men identified as “supporters” of Griffin attacked camera crews, verbally abusing them and punching the lenses of cameras before being restrained.
Griffin’s defence team said he had grown up in an outlawed motorcycle gang in Victoria, and had been grieving the deaths of his uncle and a close friend at the time of the attack on the kangaroo, and may have been suffering from depression.
Magistrate Gregory Benn said this did not explain the animal cruelty, and dismissed the claim Griffin had shot the animal in the eye as a means of “putting it out of its misery”, local news outlet communitynews.au reported.
The prosecution said Griffin had not shown any remorse and had not cooperated with police despite turning himself in after a video of the attack was widely shared on social media.
The gun and knuckledusters have never been recovered.
Griffin’s lawyer said he had been at home drinking beer and taking acid and cocaine, and had not intended to go out that night.
They said while he was “peer pressured to attend a boys’ night out”, the kangaroo shooting had not been a “planned event”.
But the prosecution said the group was “going for a shoot” and Griffin “knew what they were doing”.
Magistrate Benn said he understood the cruelty to be a kind of rite of passage for the motorcycle gang, “as disgusting at that sounds”, the ABC reports.
He said the attack was not just friends out shooting, but was directly related to motorcycle gang culture.
A fourth man is due in court in connection with the kangaroo’s death in July.
