Seems rather risky to own a pet. Someone else was taking care of the guy's dog and he goes to jail over a lousy cat??? Lame. How can that be a criminal matter? You should be able to get a cat like that at the pound for $5 not $30,000 dollars. The judge should be ashamed of itself. I can see if the dog was known to be viscious and it attacked a human but this is absurd. I would never want to live in a place like that. As far as I know the value of something is not set by how much an individual arbitrarily values it. $15000 worth of emotional duress over a cat seems reasonable for some people but that doesn't mean that every time someone gets worked up over something it should be worth money. I could see a couple hundred bucks depending on how egregious the owner's negligence was but geez.

This is a hoax right?