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Animal Abuse in the News
By Erica Westly | July 30, 2009
Our relationship with animals? As Facebook would say, "it's complicated."
Several national news stories about animal abuse have caught my attention this summer. A few days ago, Connecticut police broke up a bird fighting ring. Strangely enough, the birds being used in the fights were finches and canaries–not species one typically thinks of as aggressive. 19 men were arrested and over $8,000 in gambling money was confiscated.
Then, of course, Michael Vick, having served a 18-month sentence for dog fighting, was reinstated by the NFL this week. Last week, PETA posted an undercover video of circus elephant abuse. And a little over a month ago, a Florida teenager was arrested for mutilating and killing 19 neighborhood cats.
These may all seem like clear cases of animal cruelty, but it’s also important to remember that our relationship with animals is constantly evolving. What we consider acceptable behavior today could be considered abusive twenty years from now. Killing animals, even dogs and cats, is condoned by our culture in certain circumstances, such as medical research and overpopulation. In those cases where we’ve actively decided to kill an animal, the line between humane behavior and cruelty is much harder to define.
I don’t really support the idea of hunting for sport, but I came across David Petzal’s guidelines for teaching your child to hunt on Field & Stream’s website the other day, and I think a lot of his points make sense. Maybe if more kids were taught how to have respectful relationships with animals early on, the average adult would be more informed about what constitutes cruelty. At the least, such training might help prevent future animal cruelty cases by helping identify which children seem to have problems with animals and, therefore, shouldn’t be encouraged to work with them, own them, etc.
Topics: Culture, Miscellaneous, Psychology | No Comments »