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WIRED:Animal torture is posted online – and a maligned internet community helps catch the culprit, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

THE INTERNET can be a window to some dreadful cruelty: but physical cruelty always takes place elsewhere. When an anonymous teenager uploaded videos of himself mistreating a small household cat to YouTube, the crime was in what he had done, not that he’d shown the world the evidence. But what happened next was a direct result of that upload. It’s either an illustration that justice can be reached even in the less salubrious parts of the net; or it shows that sometimes the net reaches further into the real world than most people are comfortable with. The video that “Timmy” uploaded to YouTube is hard to watch: it shows two teenagers taking a cat into a bathroom (or “laboratory” as the on-camera teenager, disguised in a balaclava, calls it) and recording its yowling as they torture it. Presumably the kids thought that the video would only be seen by a few friends – or that their anonymity would be preserved.