Kansas City, Mo. ? Prosecutors charged two men with using a chair and shovel to kill five cats and injure another so badly that it had to be euthanized.

Brian Kleoppel, 31, and Jeffrey Hoeppner, 29, both of Odessa, were charged Thursday with six counts of animal abuse and were being held on $2,500 bond each.

The alleged abuse happened July 24 at a trailer home in Independence.

Court documents indicate that a neighbor heard banging and saw Kleoppel trying to crush a cat with a chair while Hoeppner cut the cat with a shovel. Police found five cats dead and two others – one of which was later euthanized – alive in a trash can.

According to the court documents, Kleoppel said he was trying to cage the cats, which his brother-in-law had left in his care, but decided to kill them when they proved unmanageable.

“It was so loud and disturbing that a neighbor hears it and sees it, and it lasts 30 minutes,” Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders said. “It was very obvious that these cats were not struck one time. They were struck with chairs and blunt objects. No one, including animals, should be made to suffer.”