My daughter is vegan and has a snake, which she feeds mice to, because (like most) that is what her species of snake eats.
Any reptile big enough to eat a puppy would be significantly dangerous around humans, especially children. My dad has had a lot of problems with snapping turtles on his (rural) property, so I’ve seen some pretty big ones, none of which have been big enough to eat a puppy.
It’s almost like you’re throwing out justifications without any actual knowledge of the biology involved.
It was a days-old puppy and was likely smaller than some of the big adult ‘feeder’ rats the turtle was used to. There’s a pic of the tank/turtle here (it’s the second one in the image carousel-- sorry, on my phone or I’d post the image).
Absolutely.
I still wouldn’t like a story where a peacefully euthanized puppy is fed to anything, but in this story, for me, it is the needless suffering of it first that I find particularly abhorrent.
Some old UK stories, there are stories of the same things (and worse!) still happening in the US. GDPR stops me from getting evidence though (I’m in the middle of a hardware upgrade, so I have no VPN for now)
this is the weirdest way to backdoor an argument for the superiority of western culture
People eat dogs, they eat cats, they eat possums, they eat horses, some of them even eat apes, and while I wouldn’t do any of that, I can recognize that my circumstances aren’t the same nor are they necessarily superior than the people who choose to do that. The only distinction to make is when we are on the brink of eliminating a particular animal, and in that case, the argument usually hinges on biodiversity, not sapience.
This is not justifying superiority in culture this is drawing the line within said culture. This incident took place in Idaho, by an american born/raised middle school teacher.
One can judge one’s own cultural norms/values.
Additionally…this is not “OMG THIS GUY ATE A DOG WHAT A MONSTER” that is NOT the point being made. The point being made is he fed a defenseless and sickly puppy to another creature in an inhumane manner. If you continue to mis-represent other peoples points and arguments I am sure the you will find many of your posts eaten soon enough.
Not right now (PC rebuild, GDPR blocks, no VPN), but ask a dog owner what it would have taken for turn a friendly dog (as most K9 rejects are) into an attack dog. They don’t want to attack people normally, they are broken into doing so.
A sick puppy who wasn’t eating and most likely going to die on its own. It is fairly common for not all the puppies or kittens of litter to survive. So had he not fed it to the turtle it would have been feeding the worms.
Like I said I can see why some people find this distasteful, but from the article the puppy was a goner anyway. I don’t have a problem with feeding it to another animal. YMMV.
I suppose topics like this serve a purpose; they can help reveal people’s core values, and helps disseminate people who would probably be cool to hang out with from people you would never want to turn your back on.
Well, you did provide that, which is fairly old at this point, so I am at a loss as to why you are unable to find anything more recent to state your claim.
While it is anecdotal, I am a life long dog owner. My neighbor is the K9 officer for our town. I have seen the dogs they work with, and have never seen cruelty involved. The training they go through is intensive and extreme compared to a house pet absolutely and perhaps even more so than what many working dogs also might see. But my son goes through far more rigorous training and conditioning in a premier soccer program than kids do in recreational soccer…I don’t think it is cruel and inhumane as a result.
More rigorous or intensive is not necessarily cruel…and I have never witnessed or heard of K-9 officer mistreating their dogs. I was personally attacked by my Aunt’s dog when I was young. I remember it well. Everyone was shocked as her Shepard was a loving and loyal house pet she had since he was a pup…but he went after me like I was dinner on a silver platter. She did not train the dog to do so, it did not take any “breaking” to get it to do so.
I had to deal with something like this when I was in high school–a sadistic biology teacher who would feed live chickens to his snakes and turtles while we were taking tests.
I don’t care what he said, or what this man says, there was sadistic pleasure involved. They did it, and did it publicly so that people had to watch.
That’s an entirely different point though…and I would argue we are probably straying off topic.
I do not entirely disagree that the act of training dogs to do the work of a K-9 police dog is holistically cruel; but the point that was put forth and backed up with 20 year old info was that the training and conditions were cruelty. Which I would argue may not be entirely true.
Let me put it this way…the idea of training a human being to be able to kill other human beings (which is what I went through when I was in the USAR) is a cruel thing. But the training the military conducts is not cruel and inhumane. It is rigorous and intensive, but not cruel.
I think this is why we call these things (soldiers or police dogs) necessary evils? I get your point entirely and do not disagree with it though.
If you assume that people arguing against you are doing so out of cultural bias then I can see how it would look like I was arguing with you out of cultural bias.
There are people in the world who find it normal to eat horses and dogs, I don’t think they are any more cruel for doing so than people who eat cows or sheep.
But “Why the hell did you keep a sick dog in your car all day for the purpose of feeding it to a turtle in front of a a bunch of kids?” doesn’t get answered by, “You know, in other parts of the world people don’t have the same attachment to dogs as we do in this country.”
If it was purely utilitarian then why wait for until the students were there? If the point was that the turtle needed to eat then how do you explain that he first tried to feed it to a python and then fed it to the turtle when the python wasn’t hungry? The point of the act was to make sure that highschool kids bore witness to a puppy being eaten.
If you decide to slaughter a cow in front of a Hindu crowd you aren’t just harvesting meat in a utilitarian way, you are going on the offensive against their cultural values. I don’t say that because I believe in Hindu cultural superiority. Shock for the purpose of shock is childish bullshit.
And when you sacrifice an animal for the purpose of shock or to make a point, you may be transforming an act of feeding into one of cruelty.
I actually take @benfranks’s point that this may have been different in a small farm town than in the big city I’m used to. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about what was in the teacher’s head or how it was read by the students. There are cultural differences not just western vs. eastern, they are all over the place.
But the idea that we can try to judge people’s actions without reference to the culture they exist within is attempting to substitute oversimplified categories for reality. It matters that Americans care more about dogs than about mice when understanding what happened.
(I’ll admit that bringing up how many pounds the fact that Americans value dogs might weight was facetious.)
This all makes me think a bit about a scientist who was known to manually sexually stimulate a dolphin she was training when it was aroused. The dolphin just couldn’t focus when it was horny. I honestly, truly believe she was just doing what made sense in a totally utilitarian way. But if she started sliding it into every conversation she could in the lunch room, I’d start to re-evaluate my idea of her motivations.
