Well, there was a bit of a fracas, as we say, and it turned out that a man had a dog, a half dead thing according to bystanders, and he was trying to get it to stop pulling at its leash, and when it growled at him he grabbed an axe from the butcher’s stall beside him, threw the dog to the ground and cut off its back legs, just like that. I suppose people would say “Nasty bugger, but it was his dog” and so on, but Lord Vetinari called me in and he said to me “A man who would do something like that to a dog is a man to whom the law should pay close attention. Search his house immediately.” The man was hanged a week later, though not for what he did to his dog, although for my part I wouldn’t have shed a tear if he had been, but for what we found in his cellar. The contents of which I shall not burden you with. And bloody Vetinari got away with it again, because he was right: where there are little crimes, large crimes are not far behind.
Snuff, Terry Pratchett