The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Mathematics

The colonel upset at the inhumane treatment of robots (mentioned here earlier) might have a complaint against mathematicians as well. According to John Baez:

They're called "ternary rings" because they're usually described in terms of a ternary operation that generalizes xy + z. But the precise definition is too depressing for me give here. It's a classic example of what James Dolan calls "centipede mathematics", where you take a mathematical concept and see how many legs you can pull off before it can no longer walk. A ternary ring is like a division ring that can just barely limp along on its last legs.

On the other hand, some people might claim that mathematics did the torturing first.