A 23 year-old Swede who bit the head off a live mouse while his friends filmed it on a mobile phone, has been charged with animal cruelty offences. The sequence, which is less than a minute long, shows the man holding the mouse by its tail before biting its head off and spitting it back into his hand.
Egged on by his friends, the 23 year-old from the Baltic island of Gotland then lets the blood drip from the rodent’s lifeless body before stuffing it back into his mouth.
“He subjected the mouse to completely unnecessary suffering,” said prosecutor Mats Wihlborg in a report by the Gotlands Tidningar newspaper.
When asked by the newspaper if such gruesome acts are common, veterinarian Peter Marstedt said, “Animal cruelty of this kind, no, I’ve never seen anything like it before”.
The 23 year-old was identified by police after they stumbled across the film on the mobile phone which had been confiscated for unrelated reasons. The man has apparently had brushes with the law on previous occasions. He could received up to two years in prison if found guilty of animal cruelty.