Thirty-nine-year-old Emma Parker was sentenced to one year in jail Tuesday, after posting a video of herself cutting her live hamster with a knife and eating it.
The gruesome attack drew attention online and prompted an investigation by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).
The first video showed Parker repeatedly shoving a knife into her hamster, who was named Mr. Nibbles and was trapped inside a hamster ball. The defenseless animal was still alive when she cut it in half. A second video showed Parker eating one half of the freshly murdered hamster, then the other half, as she gagged and chugged water from a plastic bottle. The woman behind the camera could be heard laughing as Parker devoured her pet.
“The defendant is holding the ball with a knife in the other hand,” Prosecutor Gordon Holt said, according to the Daily Mail. “She takes the knife and plunges it through the opening of the ball moving the knife from side to side.”
“A spectator is heard laughing and says, ‘You are a sick bitch, you are,'” he continued. ‘The hamster can be heard repeatedly squealing; it is allowed to escape and runs around a while. The defendant attempts to strike it with the knife, successfully at least once. She pinches its neck to keep it still. It is still alive and she uses the knife in a chopping and sawing motion over the middle of the hamster’s body.”
Parker reportedly admitted to police that she was the woman in the video and stated that she believed she was helping the animal die, as it had been bitten by one of her dogs earlier in the day, according to the Mail.
A veterinarian with 27 years of experience said Mr. Nibbles would have suffered both physical and psychological damage as a result of the torture, and claimed she had never heard a hamster squeal like Mr. Nibbles did. (RELATED: James Cameron Makes Tone Deaf Comments Conflicting With Premise Of His Highly Anticipated Movie)
Woman eats a hamster in exchange for crack cocaine https://t.co/Vtth4JH1s2
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) June 25, 2022
Parker admitted to one charge of causing unnecessary suffering to a protected animal, according to the Mail.
In addition to being sentenced to one year in prison, Parker was banned from keeping animals for 15 years.