What assumption am I making? Seriously, I know I have a blind spot when it comes to puppies and kittens and kids…
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How long do you think that will last? I would think most of the parents wouldn’t be thrilled with this guy remaining on the faculty.
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Aye, he is a true product of the 1980s, when the bestsellers were Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche and Truly Tasteless Jokes, when Hollywood was milking the myth of POW’s and sending waves of action heroes in to free them. When the Reagan administration tried to declare catsup a vegetable, and took the solar panels off of the White House out of spite. When splatter movies turned murdering maniacs into superheroes.
So the should not be surprised. It’s classical authoritarianism, a glorification of sadism. Trump is merely the most distilled form to date, as even Dubya was clever enough to pretend to be “compassionate” (until we saw how little he cared during Katrina).
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Agreed. I get what he is using as his justification, but that doesn’t completely fly. When an animal is sick the first thought shouldn’t be “Let’s feed it to a bigger animal!” You should think “Let me check with a vet and see what we can do.” and worst case scenario is “let’s put it down” not…“HEY LET’S FIND A BIG SNAKE!!!”
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If i’m reading your comment correctly, i have some bad news.
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That man needs to be put on a serial killer watch list.
Now the parents need to go after him for traumatizing their child.
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From the article:
After school ended, Crosland stayed to help a student with a project. He mentioned to the few students in his classroom that he needed to feed his animals and asked if anyone would be offended because a puppy would be involved. The witnesses all testified Friday that they did not have a problem with it.
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He fed an animal to an animal that eats animals*. He did it after hours, didn’t make a spectacle of it, and the few kids that were there working on a project after school were consulted before he did it. He’s no more a “psychopath” than anyone who maintains the reptile enclosure at a zoo.
The fact that the school cafeteria almost certainly served the kids chicken nuggets or pepperoni pizza that week is a monumentally more harmful, vile, and unnecessary act of animal cruelty than anything this teacher is being pilloried for.
Anyone clutching their pearls at this story, who also eats animal products themselves, is a hypocrite (and a participant in president steak-and-ketchup’s culture of casual cruelty, FWIW). I bet you wouldn’t think this man was a “sicko” (and he wouldn’t have made headlines) if he’d fed the turtle a porkchop sourced from a pig (even more intelligent than a dog) that spent its entire short life in agonizing factory farm conditions before being slaughtered, butchered, and had its bits sanitized and shrink-wrapped. This animal endured significantly less cruelty, and was intended to be fed to an obligate carnivore (a python) that actually needs to eat animals, which is a much less cruel and unnecessary story than that behind your average hamburger or wedge of cheese.
*Notably, snapping turltles are omnivores, and most ethically he would be feeding it plant matter, but apparently he had initially meant to feed it to the class python, which didn’t end up feeding, and the turtle was the second option.
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Are you suggesting he should only feed healthy animals to his python and turtle? Or somehow put his python on a vegetarian diet (snapping turtles are apparently omnivores, so it might be feasible to feed it in a cruelty-free way)?
Hmmm, at first I was having trouble seeing. NOW I’m having trouble comprehending. I’m…just gonna delete that comment…and my account…and the internet.
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It’s all just part of the Great Circle of Nature. Puppies are the natural diet of turtles, I think.
“An internal investigation conducted by the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office found Wallace’s actions did not violate any policies or laws,”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If this is factually the case, then the policies and laws are wrong. Not to mention discharging a firearm near people (or at domestic animals) when not necessary should be considered reckless endangerment. It should in the least be a violation against waste of department resources, if you want to get tax-payers involved in the argument.
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I have always been intrigued by the way people regard and treat animals- I think it says so much more about us than the animals themselves.
Culture and relative comfort and security of people plays a big part, as does the proximity and relationship (working or companionship animals or slaughterhousebound and culled).
At one end of the spectrum animals are objectified in ways that make cruelty easy and at the other they might be objectified in ways that seem kind but are just as self serving to people in the end.
Somewhere in the middle there is an empathetic understanding and respect for animals that seems almost unobtainable in the modern world…
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I am suggesting that why in this classroom/environment?
Look…nature sucks in the sense there is a food chain. I am not going to ignore that his python or snapping turtle need to eat (smaller mammals/reptiles being the normal expectation - rats, mice, lizards, etc). But why in this classroom? Why in front of the students?
I can have the discussion around healthy vs sickly animals. Some predatory species will specifically target sickly prey, others will avoid sickly prey as it potentially can make the predator sick too! But in this case why not bring the pup to a Vet and have it checked out? Why feed a puppy which as a domesticated animal we have more attachment and affinity for as opposed to a standard feeding option where we have less attachment? Or to your point in the case of the Turtle…why feed it meat at all?
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Would you have preferred:
-The turtle and python be fed an animal that also died horribly, but out of view?
-The turtle and python never be fed, and slowly died of starvation?
Are those somehow “less cruel” options?
I don’t (knowingly) eat or use any animal stuff. I find the whole industry of animal exploitation completely unnecessary, vile, and awful. I think that ideally, if we’re in care of obligate carnivores, the meat they need to eat to survive should be as cruelty free as possible. But I don’t see anyone in the comments calling for the turtle or python to have been fed some kind of lab-grown vat meat, just a bunch of people calling the teacher a “sicko” for feeding it an animal that’s on their arbitrary, short, list of “animals it’s not okay to (see) hurt.”
The fact that the turtle was unnecessarily destroyed as a consequence of this pearl-clutching, and no one seems to give a fuck about that, indicates that this is less about people caring animal cruelty than about people uncritically parroting arbitrary social norms that have no meaningful relation to actual ethical choices or beliefs.
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One of the classes in my daughter’s school has a class python. They regularly feed him mice (that are alive, since that’s what snakes prefer). They don’t throw a sick puppy in there, just cause… This is not the same thing as feeding a reptile it’s usually meal.
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Now I wanna barf again.
But why in this classroom?
The turtle lives in the classroom, so it makes sense that it be fed there. Its presence in the classroom, like many class pets in science classrooms, is instructional. We had an aquarium with frogs in it that our teacher fed crickets tom growing up. I’ve known teachers to have corn snakes that they fed mice to, etc.
Why in front of the students?
The animal was not fed during normal class time. It was after hours, there were only a few students there working on a special project, and they were consulted first. All of the students assented beforehand, and afterward asserted that they were not upset by the animal having been fed while they were present.
Why feed a puppy which as a domesticated animal we have more attachment and affinity for as opposed to a standard feeding option where we have less attachment?
How is this, in any way, less cruel? It’s literally just playing favorites. Maybe that teacher is a cat person (or a python/turtle person), and has no attachment or affinity with dogs? Considering the inherent subjectivity and arbitrariness by which one develops attachment to different animals, that doesn’t really work well as a standard by which to judge his actions as “cruel.”
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WTAF?
OK the turtle or python need to eat but a live sick puppy?
In front of his students? Was he looking for someone who enjoyed the process so he can share fun nights in being cruel to animals.
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Why is it more cruel to feed a live puppy to a python (his original plan) or a turtle than a live mouse? Why is one’s motivation deemed “just [be]because” when feeding a puppy to an animal, but is somehow right and justified when feeding a mouse to the same animal? How is the line not completely arbitrary?
Ideally, it would be best if there were a way to feed these animals without having to kill other animals, for sure, but the distinction between feeding it a puppy versus a mouse is not a meaningful distinction. It’s an arbitrary cultural bias with no relation to actual concern for animal suffering.
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