*WARNING: GRAPHIC AND DISTRESSING IMAGE BELOW*
An animal charity in Galway has launched an investigation after a group of teenagers tortured a foal in the city before setting it alight.
The GSCPA said that it received a call at the weekend to alert them to the fact that the foal and its mother were being mistreated in the Castlepark area of the city but the baby animal was dead by the time they arrived.
It's understood that several people, including children as young as nine, witnessed the attack and saw the group of youths assault the foal with sticks and stones.
“The foal was only about two weeks old. There was a gang of children and young teens involved. They beat it until it died. To do the damage they did they would have had to use sticks or stones,” Margaret O'Sullivan of the GSPCA told the
Irish Independent.
“We think it was dead when they set it on fire. It’s just horrific, I can’t describe it. For anybody to be able to carry out such cruelty on an animal is a real concern. We all know that serial killers start off killing animals and if you can do this to a baby foal, where does it end. The gang that did this were very young, just in their early teens but there were children around nine or ten also there at the time. This was witnessed by a number of people."
The mother of the foal had been taken from the site by the time the GSPCA arrived and her whereabouts are not known.
