Ah ha! I will invent an over-the-counter home euthanasia kit which people can buy cheaply so that they can kill their pets humanely and then throw the bodies in the trash.
Rats are wild animals. People generally don't buy them to deliberately torture them. There aren't amish rat mills in rural PA. If some nutjob posted a video on youtube in which he tortured a bunch of rats he bought at a pet store, PETA would go nuts (for the record, I don't like PETA)
Hmm.. I'm sure people wouldn't use such a thing on their children, would they? ... maybe it's a bad idea.
A rat trap has got to be considered torture, considering they often don't die immediately. Who determines the "sanctity of life" of these animals? The ones that we deem "wild" do not have lives that are as important?
I see what you are saying, people do get more upset over clubbing seals than other forms of slaughter for meat and skin. But I think the reason no one goes crazy over mistreatment of rats is simply because not a lot of people mistreat sewer rats. I think people only mistreat animals they have access too, AKA house pets. Who the hell is going to go through all the trouble to catch a sewer rat to abuse it.
A. Man shoots a dog. B. Man shoots a rat. C. Man shoots a pig. D. Man shoots a cow. E. Man shoots a crow. Who goes to prison longer?
I think most people have access to rats in their houses, whether they like it or not. :grin: Rat meet rat trap. I agree with everything torture related in this thread. Anyone, that tortures anything, needs therapy. Wierd kids with a magnifying glass included.
Don't know, is it illegal to shoot a dog? in fact is it illegal to shoot a cow, pig, birds? I think in all those cases some sort of animal group would be on your ass except shooting a rat, which people consider as pests.
I get where you're going with that, but rats are a bad example. The potentially fatal diseases that they can carry and that can spread through droppings to humans make dogs & rats apples & oranges. I agree, though, that it's far more "natural" to most of humankind to sympathize more with a mistreated dog as opposed to a mistreated rat.
In Arkansas, the dog shooter of course. Rats are considered disease carrying vermin so they want those gone by any means necessary. While pigs cannot be released and hunted, if they go missing for a certain period of time they are considered feral and can be hunted and shot legally. You can shot a cow but only as a means to kill it for processing, you cannot hunt them. We actually have a hunting season for crows in Arkansas.
Bottom line for me, dogs are domesticated animals. We have bred them, over the course of thousands of years, to be loyal companions. There's nothing hypocritical about having more sympathy for the plight dogs as opposed to other animals. It's not just that we view them as man's best friend as a culture, we've BRED them to be man's best friend. Also, I think it's off base to suggest that people don't have sympathy for other animals, in addition to dogs.
Do Americans have more sympathy for African Americans because of the hundreds of years of breeding to create the strong, obedient, super slave? Should we sympathize and help with their plights, more than another American ethnicity, because of this?
Killing an animal, including a dog, is not so outrageous. However, knowingly torturing an animal is pretty sick and is probably a good lead indicator for other sociopathic behaviors. Killing for food or eliminating vermin or even sporting is qualitatively different from killing for sadism or lack of compassion. It'd be best to get those people into the criminal justice system on their animal tortures so we can watch them when they escalate. So prosecuting the hell out of the perp is a good idea, even if it is just an animal. Patrick's story of recovery is heartwarming and all, but I probably would have euthanized him. How much did they spend rehabbing an animal from death's door?
(and couldn't they have spent all that effort, attention, and money on a needy child instead of a dog?)
