If you’re a religious fundie, odds are your level of respect for other living creatures not gifted with ‘a soul’ is not very high. Most fundamentalists see violence and cruelty towards animals as just a normal part of everyday life. God, in their deluded eyes, gave them total dominion over animals, and that means you can treat them like shit if you want.

How else can you explain this bit of cruelty? Ex FLDS member Isaac Wyler – who left cult leader Warren Jeffs’ little coven a number of years ago – woke up to find a kitten encased in concrete in his back yard. Still alive but terrified, the poor creature was buried to its neck, and left inside a metal tube in his back yard. The kitten was intended to be a warning for Isaac to stop speaking out against the church, and Warren Jeffs in particular. Jeffs is currently serving a life sentence for having forced himself on so many underage girls (the man took a page right out of Joseph Smith’s playbook), but he still appears to have enough power and connections in jail he’s even managed to stop all but 15 of his thousands of followers from having sex (well, I doubt the veracity of this claim, but I digress).

I’d like to tell you rescue workers were able to save the poor cat, but the trauma of being both encased and released from a concrete prison was too much for the little guy. The town sheriff, when made aware of this stunning bit of cruelty, simply laughed it off, and suggested ‘throwing dirt’ on the animal to fix the situation. The fact a police officer won’t take animal cruelty seriously (usually a sign of escalating violence) is itself a consequence of the level of religiosity of the town. What else do you expect, folks? Religion poisons everything, including police work!