As many will know one of the many jobs I’ve done in my life is that of a court reporter. I sat through and reported on trials involving some of the worst people on the planet. In Crown Courts I’ve covered one of the last trials of the PIE-men which saw the end of the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange group. I’ve seen evidence by police officers and forensic experts describing how a man killed his wife and distributed the body parts around various skips in London, I’ve seen cases involving conscienceless gangsters, lairy football hooligans and some of the worst predators against women and children you could imagine. In Magistrates courts I’ve seen the mad the sad and the bad, the petty criminals who make life a misery for others and in some cases are the cause of their own misery. It’s in the Magistrates courts that I’ve seen bizarre stuff such as the sixty seven year old ‘working girl’, a man who stole a train from Kings Cross and a man called Eric who as an importuning tranny, was plying his trade around derelict buildings in North London decades before such things as trannyism were fashionable.

But I’ve never seen a case as bizarre or as stomach churning as this one from Australia.

Sky News said:

A prominent British crocodile expert and academic has pleaded guilty to 56 charges of bestiality involving the rape, torture and killing of dogs.

Adam Britton tortured and exploited more than 42 dogs until his arrest in April 2022, Australian media reported.

The 51-year-old zoologist, based in Darwin, Australia, appeared at the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory (NT) on Monday where he admitted the charges – and also pleaded guilty to four counts of accessing and transmitting child abuse material.

Chief Justice Michael Grant said the offending – which resulted in the deaths of 39 dogs – “could only be described as grotesque cruelty” and urged members of the public, security staff and reporters to leave the court before the detailed charges were read out by prosecutor Marty Aust.

“These facts contain material that can only be described as grotesque and perverse acts of cruelty which is confronting and distressing and which in my assessment have the potential to cause nervous shock,” the judge said.

The court heard Britton had a “sadistic sexual interest” in animals, and in particular dogs.

Apparently this ‘Crocodile Pervy’ character was so well respected in the world of wildlife experts that he once took part in a documentary with Sir David Attenborough. The fact that Britton was able to hide is proclivities so successfully for so long and fool so many people to thinking he was the normal regular sort of animal lover is testament to his apparent powers of persuasion.

What on earth is to be done with offenders like this? Australia has no death penalty and I don’t believe that anyone has been executed for such an offence in Australian history and I can’t find any executions for bestiality in the UK since 1640. It’s likely to be the case that due to the seriousness of the offences and the child sexual abuse materials he was caught with he’s looking at an extremely long gaol sentence of something along the lines of 14 years. He’s so sick that I would not be surprised if this case is disposed of by way of some sort of long term or maybe permanent mental hospital order. In any event, I believe that this is the sort of offender who might never be safe to release into the world again.

One of the things that fascinated me about working the court beat was that whether in the dock or in the well of the court amongst the lawyers and solicitors it could be said that all human life was there. But cases like Britton’s remind me that it is in the dock that is found the sort of human life that is lower than a snake’s belly.