The reason given by Rooki for most of the actions was “missinformation”, not anything related to animal abuse. One of the two mods was demoted for “endangering pets”. At the time of the incident, the only vaguely related rule was 6. Violent Content that talks about visual content depicting dismemberment, murder, suicide, animal abuse, and so on. Though the OP is confusing and at times inaccurate, it still accepts that “at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.”

It didn’t return any search results during the Bing outage, as experienced by me personally and reported by others. At least one blog post claims it relies on Bing.

As far as I know, Startpage uses Bing, not Google now. The same is true for Ecosia.