2. David Sedaris wrote a story called "Loggerheads" revealing the way he and a friend, when they were young, treated some sea turtles. As an adult, looking back, he identifies with them, but here's the description of the fate of 5 baby sea turtles he found at a beach and installed in his aquarium and fed raw hamburger:
The turtles swam the short distance from one end of the tank to the other, and then they batted at the glass with their flippers, unable to understand that this was it—the end of the road....
It took a few weeks for my first turtle to die. The water in the tank had again grown murky with spoiled, uneaten beef, but there was something else as well, something I couldn’t begin to identify. The smell that developed in the days after Halloween, this deep, swampy funk, was enough to make your eyes water. It was as if the turtles’ very souls were rotting, yet still they gathered in the corner of their tank, determined to find the sea...
All they’d ever wanted was to live in the ocean—that was it, their entire wish list, and instead I’d decided they’d be better off in my bedroom. Just as my dad had decided that I’d be better off at the football game. If I could have returned them to the beach, I would have, though I knew it was already too late. In another few days they would start going blind. Then their shells would soften, and they’d just sort of melt away, like soap.
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As a survivor of 34-years of professional work in criminal corrections, I was aware that those who tortured animals disproportionally go on think of other persons as "less than human" and criminally injure them.
Unless my memory fails me, Jeffery Dalmer was one of those critters.
Why are people who write/talk on NPR,the New Yorker, Atlantic, such idiots?
I wouldn't have treated sea turtles this way when I was five, and my parents wouldn't have let me.
My daughter, a vet supplies rep, posts on animal cruelty every day in Facebook and it has sensitized me to the horrible things people deliberately do to animals.
I believe there will be payback someday for that, somewhere, somehow.
For girls to be doing this, it's an almost 100% reliable indicator they were abused by some male in the past.
somewhere some tortoise is saying human women have declared a "War on tortoises!"
WTF is wrong with these people?
Heinous. Repugnant.
campy said...
For girls to be doing this, it's an almost 100% reliable indicator they were abused by some male in the past.
Thank goodness! For a moment there I thought some females might actually have to take personal responsibility for something bad they did.
campy says
For girls to be doing this, it's an almost 100% reliable indicator they were abused by some male in the past.
Maybe they were abused by a tortoise, makes about as much sense.
Met a Child Services social worker who claimed if a child did not look you in the eye when you talked to them, it meant the child had been sexually abused. Met another who claimed little children do not lie.
I really can't understand parents who let their kids keep those turtle cesspools in their bedrooms.
Torture. Most torture, human against human, involves at least a semblance of recognition: I know why you hate me, I know the information you want, I don't know the information but you think maybe I could. But animals: are they really going to divulge useful information? I am with the Tortoise Liberation Front, and I am not afraid to shoot little girls.
"Thank goodness! For a moment there I thought some females might actually have to take personal responsibility for something bad they did."
I agree. You can be sure that if a female does anything bad, a man is responsible. That's why I support women occupying all positions of power and responsibility. What could go wrong?
I like animals, especially insects. It turns out I'm immune to mosquitoes. I don't know why, but in any case I love breeding and attracting them for other people to enjoy. I always keep old tires lying around in my yard.
It's awful that some people use those UV zappers to attract and kill them. The joke is on them, though, since the zappers mostly kill crane flies and mosquitoes of the other 3000+ species that don't bite humans, not to mention male mosquitoes that don't bite at all.
There was something seriously wrong with Sedaris's parents.
2 teenage girls arrested for torturing a gopher tortoise.
Sucks.
When I was in 6th grade (~1960) I got a small desert tortoise from, IIRC, a Walgreens. It lived in the backyard for over 40 years, got to about a foot long, hibernated in a storage shed and laid a weird egg every year, then went to a tortoise rescue group when my mom died.
Is there any hard evidence that most killers torture animals in their youth?
I want to SO call bullshit on this.
Hitler never tortured animals.
David Sedaris's parents seem odd in a whole lot of his stories.
My parents always had the 'wild things belong in the wild' philosophy-- sometimes we were allowed to put the turtle in the box and watch it for a few hours and try to feed it a leaf, but it always had to be back home in its proper habitat by bedtime.
I just assumed that was a rule all parents had...
etbass said "My daughter, a vet supplies rep, posts on animal cruelty every day in Facebook and it has sensitized me to the horrible things people deliberately do to animals."
Someone somewhere related to this said something like "Oh, c'mon; there are cruel kids in every generation".
These two statements ring true.
Kids can be cruel.
Children can be vicious critters. Any predator will exhibit callous disregard for it's prey, be it baby humans or Bengal tigers. A hunter once wrote of watching from a blind two tigers attack an elephant. they leapt on its head and neck and clawed its eyes out. The tigers didn't have any hope of killing and eating the elephant, and it was obvious they weren't trying to. they just did it for the hell of it, or as some people would put it, just to see if they could. I doubt the tigers had been abused as children. The preconceived notion that female humans are somehow above their animal nature is as fantastic as declaring that the moon is made of green cheese.
When I was a kid my neighbor tore the legs off a grasshopper. I told my parents, and my dad nearly came unglued. He made me understand back then that just because you can't feel an insect's pain doesn't mean it's ok to torture it. That stuck with me.
I live in Texas, where there are roaches more than 2" long. As someone said, you don't want to throw a brick at one to kill it, because if you miss, it has a weapon. These things are heinous, and I can't believe they serve any purpose except to spread disease. Even so, when I have to smack one, I try to make it a clean kill, because of what my dad said.
I certainly hope these girls are outliers. But watching a bit of Beyonce' and Britney Spears, I don't think girls are being raised to be virtuous and kind any more.
It's wrong to hurt animals.
But it's also wrong to hurt people. Sometimes you have to hurt people to protect other people (e.g. from violent assaults) and/or to provide justice or to allow for a peaceful civilization (e.g. thieves, vandals, and arsonists).
This is not one of those times. People should not be hurt to provide justice for animals. Period. Hurting the people is not a necessary evil, so it's not an evil we should commit, regardless of the feelings we have for the animals.
To those people saying this means they'll torture people in the future, you might as well say this means they're engaged in witchcraft. It's a similar statement, with similar prejudice.
You don't know the future. Stop pretending you do. Stop using predictions of the future to justify otherwise unjustifiable actions against people.
Jeez. It's a turtle. It's not even a mammal. Who cares?
Back until the 1960's gopher tortoises were made into a stew by Florida Beach Crackers...I know because I've had many a bowl of "Gopher Stew" back in the day. Until the 1970's Florida was a largely unsettled state - only a few million people lived here and life up until WWII was fairly hard scrabble. Gopher tortoise was on the menu until it became a protected species... Yum.
Kohath - you think it's ok to torture animals? I think you might be a psycho.
In many species, the female is as predatory or more so than the male. They have to be, because they must be able to protect their young. Human females are also quite predatory. Maybe this explains why they excel in the legal profession.
Are people naturally selfish and sinful? I think so. I think the behavior of the animal torturers discussed here supports the idea of original sin.
Also, I am glad the childhood behavior which led my parents to correct me is not documented on Facebook or Youtube. Knowing that my mom remembers is bad enough.
Did the people doing the arresting at least go vegetarian for a day?
No I am not a big fan of torturing something for the hell of it. On the other hand we shot those feral dogs that would bark at us at night overseas. Most of the people posting moral indignation here hopefully didn't partake in a chicken sandwich lately. The only thing they did wrong was the lack of respect to not kill it before they cooked it.
@Kohath,
you are correct. We can't predict whether these girls will later be criminals. The odds might be high, but the future is unknown to us.
Actually...
@JamesPawlak
You, and others in corrections, see a noticeable number people who (A) tortured animals when they were young, and (B) later became violent.
You didn't see the people who did (A), but never did (B). You also didn't see the people who never did either of (A) or (B).
I'm fairly certain you saw people who didn't do (A), but did (B).
While you can likely look inside any prison population and find many people who did both (A) and (B), you can't say that (A) predicts (B) on that data.
(Caveat: If you've also seen sociological studies that carefully documented (A)/(B) in the general population and in the criminal population, you might be able to find data showing that (A) leads to (B), and not-(A) leads to not-(B)...which would support your conclusion. But that data hasn't been presented here, and I'm not aware of it elsewhere.)
I don't mean to say that these girls are safe from becoming criminals. Nor do I mean that torturing animals is right.
I'm saying that we don't have the enough evidence to predict whether these girls will end up in prison.
@SJ
I have proposed we should subject such claims to a jury trial. If a prosecutor can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these girls will definitely commit, say, aggravated assault against a person in the future, then they can be punished for doing it, even if they haven't done it yet.
The defense will be that the future is unknown, and it's always reasonable to have doubts about specific future predictions.
Does anyone think a fair jury would convict? If you don't, then punishing people based on predictions of the future is unjust.
The turtles swam the short distance from one end of the tank to the other ... turtletankdecorations.blogspot.com
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