Margaret Fowler runs a holistic veterinarian’s office out of her Panama City Beach home. Her business, Acupuncture and Holistic Veterinary Services of Northwest Florida, specializes in the practice of Chinese and holistic medicine, according to her answering machine.
Now this holistic healer has been charged with felony animal cruelty.
Her crime: a neighbor says she killed a cat, beating it to death with a rubber mallet, reports the Panama City News Herald.
The neighbor, Bay County sheriff’s deputies said, spotted Fowler in a nearby yard “hitting something several times with what appeared to be a hard rubber mallet with a wooden handle.”
The witness told investigators she saw Fowler pick up the object she was beating — which she later recognized as a cat. Fowler then took the cat to a nearby privacy fence and then walked back to her home.
The witness went over to the cat — she discovered that it was her live-in boyfriend’s pet.
The neighbor notified authorities.
When questioned, the holistic vet told deputies she noticed the cat was injured and appeared to have been hit by a car when she found it. She said the cat dragged itself to the fence, where she “poked the cat with her foot and then left it, as, being a vet, she could tell it was dead,” BCSO spokeswoman Ruth Corley wrote.
A necropsy — conducted by the senior director of veterinary forensic sciences for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — indicated otherwise: the poor cat was beaten to death with a round blunt object.
Photo: Bay County Sheriff’s Office / Panama City News Herald
Margaret Fowler is charged with felony animal cruelty, according to the Bay County Sheriff’s Office.
