When you give your cat a bath, it’s a very limited environment and you aren’t just tossing it and expecting it to swim. Very different. The person who rescued the cat said it was barely alive.
The cat is in the film, very much swimming and active... it was not some passed out lump.
As I said, there may be more film that I have not seen, but what I saw, nothing comes close to abuse.
A cat or dog and most other animal knows how to swim.. even an elephant believe it or not can swim instinctively. They didn’t toss the cat huge distances and let it swim until it lost its strength.
They tossed it a few feet, and it swam back to them, or from one of them to another... Again there may be more footage, but what I saw nothing appeared to be putting the kitten in any physical danger.
if they had dumped it over the side of a boat and drove away, certainly... if they had tossed it 500 feet into the air, or thrown it with all their might as far away as they could trying to drown it certainly, but from what I saw that was not the case here.
At no point in what video I was able to find of the incident were these two attempting to do harm to the cat. Now would I take my kitten onto a public beach and do this? No, but what I saw didn’t come across as abuse.