A well-known British scholar and crocodile expert has admitted guilt to several counts of animal cruelty including the rape, torture and murder of dogs. The 51-year-old Adam Robert Corden Britton commenced his criminal behaviour in 2014 and continued until his arrest in April 2022. He sexually abused more than 42 canines and shared videos and images of the same on online forums under pseudonyms.
He entered a guilty plea to the 56 counts on 25 September in front of the Northern Territory Supreme Court. Furthermore, he also entered a guilty plea to four charges of accessing and distributing child abuse materials.
The public gallery, security personnel and the media were asked to leave the courtroom by the judge, Chief Justice Michael Granthim before prosecutor Marty Aust presented the agreed facts of the charges. The details of the accusation were so heinous that he cautioned the court’s attendees that the evidence might induce “nervous shock.”
He warned, “These facts contain material that can only be described as grotesque and perverse acts that could only be described as grotesque cruelty which are both confronting and distressing and which in my assessment have the potential to cause nervous shock or some other adverse psychological reaction to a person exposed to those details. Either way, I’ll leave that up to you, but the potential has been described.”
The perpetrator’s identity had been concealed by a suppression order, but it has since been lifted. The court was informed that he had a “sadistic sexual interest” in animals, especially dogs and he ended the lives of around 40 animals on purpose in a pattern of behaviour that went back at least nine years prior. He had a shipping container on his property that he referred to as his “torture room.”
It was stuffed with laptops, cameras, external hard drives and sex toys when police searched the rural property outside Darwin last year. According to the prosecution, the accused used the container “to torture, sexually exploit, and kill dogs.”
He bought the animals from their previous owners on the online classifieds website Gumtree Australia and assured them that he would take good care of them. He also abused his own Swiss Shepherd pets, Ursa and Bolt for whom he had set up an Instagram account. Crown Prosecutor Marty Aust revealed, “Using these applications, the offender discussed his ‘kill count’ and described the shipping container on his property as his ‘torture room’.”
“I had repressed it. In the last few years, I let it out again, and now I can’t stop. I don’t want to,” he had posted in an online message which was read out in court.
The offender has served as a professor at Charles Darwin University for many years and also worked with renowned British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author Sir David Frederick Attenborough. A BBC nature documentary with the latter as the narrator, titled Life in Cold Blood, included his pet crocodile Smaug a few years ago.
He spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2015 and commented, “They really wanted to get a shot of two crocodiles copulating underwater. I said, ‘OK, whatever you want, but it will be virtually impossible to film in the wild’.” He claimed to have worked with Bear Grylls as well. “He was a bit of a sook (Australian slang for wimp) to be honest. He was definitely a bit apprehensive about going in with Smaug,” he mentioned in an interview with ABC.
He was placed in imprisonment on remand. The case is scheduled for sentencing on 13 December when it is anticipated that defence attorneys will present their arguments. He is not accused of any crimes committed towards reptiles.
The wildlife worker is from West Yorkshire and was awarded his PhD in zoology by the University of Bristol. He was married for 15 years. He left the UK for Australia’s Northern Territory to pursue his passion for saltwater crocodiles, the enormous predators that inhabit the nation’s tropical regions.
The Darwin-based naturalist produced nature documentaries for the BBC and National Geographic as well as wrote books, worked on films and maintained a 16-foot-long saltwater crocodile as a pet that weighed half a tonne and gave it the name Smaug.