If you are after a legal definition I pulled this off the internet;
The words “wantonly or unreasonably” do not appear in the other offences of cruelty. In the 1993 cases of Hall v. RSPCA and RSPCA v. Isaacs, which were decided on consecutive days, the Divisional Court held that, based on a close reading of the wording of the second limb of section 1(1)(a), an offence under that limb is committed only where the suffering of an animal:
(a) was unnecessary, in the sense of its not being inevitable despite proper husbandry, and
( resulted from the unreasonable acts or omissions of the