Teacher who fed puppy to snapping turtle in front of children found not guilty of animal cruelty

If I ate you, you would also be an animal fed to an animal that eats animals. QED.

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Here’s the thing, a lot of people feel the law should see a distinction. Apparently our lawmakers have’t gotten the message. That can and should be changed.

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Sure, but that doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the cases at hand. Shit like this could have happened, has happened, at any time. In fact, as such incidents go, they’re not even close to the worst.

No.

No.

So how fucking hard is it to take it to a vet to have it put down humanely? I mean, dude could not make a fucking phone call or put the poor thing in his truck/car to drive it down to the local vet to be euthanized?

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The story also details how he left the sick puppy in his car for the whole working day, presumably suffering - denying it medical care/being euthanized humanely. Which is pretty reprehensible and would probably carry a criminal charge where I am from under The 2006 Animal Welfare Acts.

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My god, finally some sense. Nature doesn’t give a fuck. Welcome to the world.

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Since we’re making pop culture references…

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Probably pretty off topic: I was just discussing internet commenting with a friend the other day and we ended up talking about Baudrillard and hyperreality. The idea that we increasingly are unable to distinguish reality from simulacrum. One example Baudrillard used was Disneyworld - a place that is literally a simulacrum of reality. Another was pornography as “hypersex” - amplifying the signifiers of sex to our brains without us actually participating in it.

I feel like we often discuss things in an analogous “hyper-reason” where all of the form of reason is there, but there is never any reference back to reality. The only distinctions that matter are distinctions between categories of things, not actual things.

I can’t argue that there is some great and fundamental difference between mice and dogs without referring back to our lived (and therefore arbitrary and cultural) experience. But, as you rightly point out, we can’t distinguish humans from mice in any other way either. This “arbitrary cultural distinctions” aren’t there to mess up our thinking, they are the content of our lives.

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Agreed. I have had rodents as pets and dogs as pets, and I would feed most rodents to a reptile any day of the week (and have on occasion, when I had pet reptiles). Never a dog. That is fucked up.

I would tend to agree that the letter of the law does not make a legal distinction between dogs and mice in this regard. This is similar to what I thought of the Trayvon Martin shooting: legal according to the letter of the law, but morally indefensible. Both rulings are a terribly bitter pill.

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c1dbcacba53451150bf4c4d2c6661173

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It’s worth noting that nature* wouldn’t give a fuck if two humans attempted to kill one another. Does that mean we shouldn’t care?


* The journal Nature might, but i don’t think you’re referring to them.

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Considering that K9 training is animal abuse, I’m not surprised.

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some of you guys are going a long way to defend the arbitrary belief that dogs are more sapient than any of the other mammals that we feed to reptiles

like, if you want to take the full vegan anti-cruelty stance, that makes a certain amount of sense

but otherwise you are just picking and choosing what animals deserve to be food for other animals without a whole lot to back it up

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Do you eat human? If not, you too are “picking and choosing what animals deserve to be food for other animals”.

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It’s $100-$150 to euthanize a dog if memory serves. This was a days-old puppy which was going to die anyway, which the teacher’s sons had already tried to nurse back to health before giving it to their dad for the turtle that morning. He could take off work and pay money to literally waste the life of an animal, or he could help another life and feed it to a turtle for free.

Although it’s a point that’s hard to quantify, this is a farm town of ~5k people-- the culture is going to be one that’s familiar with the concept of animals, death, and the unaviodability/utility of both.

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like I said, if you want to go full vegan on this, that’s at least coherent, but there is not one thing that justifies feeding a rat to a reptile, but not a puppy, other than fashion

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Are you vegan? If not, etc.

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Citation on that?