Police can take injured animals to their shooting range to be destroyed

In Merced, Calif., it is perfectly legal for a police officer to take a critically wounded animal to the police shooting range in order to "humanely destroy" it, reported Wednesday's Merced Sun-Star.

Thanks to a decades old penal code, it is legal for officers to transport wounded animals for "humane" disposal at their shooting range.

Many animal lovers who are just learning about this practice are shocked that a police officer would transport a wounded animal to their shooting range, rather than to a veterinary clinic, for humane euthanasia or treatment.

According to Merced Police Chief Norm Andrade, the practice of transporting animals to the Gove Road shooting range is "rare," and the officers dread having to do it.

One Merced resident, 21-year-old Kathleen Emerson, heard about the shootings firsthand from city police officer.

The police officer said, ‘We get calls about dogs that are hit (by vehicles) and still alive, and if they don’t have a tag, we take them out to the range and shoot them,

There are some twists and turns to this.

Traditionally, psychopaths were seen as people who were born with their brains wired to lack empathy; sociopaths being those with normal brains who were trained at a young age to lack empathy.

Psychopaths are, however, a large gray scale.

All people must have at least some ability to disregard empathy to function.

Those with too much empathy tend to imagine sensations in others that do not exist; also to anthropomorphize human feelings in lesser life forms and inanimate objects: such people can be dangerous.

The large, moderate range of the scale is normal. People can empathize to some degree for some length of time, and then have “empathy fatigue”, where they can no longer muster the energy to care.

Those with some degree of psychopathy tend to be liked because they are seen as more objective. Those who are strongly psychopathic without being antisocial are often seen as good leaders. They are also effective in jobs that require discomfort to get a better result, such as medical surgery.

Then finally is the extreme scale of psychopath, about 5% of all people. Even here, most are not criminal, having learned how other rationales to not harm others, and rules of behavior among others. But they are incapable of caring at all, and have no empathy to even extreme suffering in others.

Sociopaths have their own rules, and while they almost have to be trained at a young age, they can only be retrained to not be sociopaths when they are still young. If they reach maturity as sociopaths, they will likely remain sociopaths.

Yes, if an animal is injured enough to warrant medical care, which no one can foot the bill for, then the simplest thing is to mercifully dispatch it. Unless you want another government program to patch up every injured stray they find, at our expense. You sound like you'd be happy with government funded universal veterinary care.

As for the rest of your argument, its apples and oranges. Animals are not people, and euthanizing stray animals cannot be compared in any way to the government forcibly euthanizing human beings.

30 years ago a feral cat gave birth to kittens behind a cabinet on my porch. I thought it was my responsibility to take them somewhere, and the closest place was a no kill clinic, but they wouldn't take them because they tested positive for some disease.

They told me to take them to the city pound where they would kill them, which I did.

They had a vacuum chamber about the size of a kitchen range, large enough to accommodate a big dog, and it had a glass door, so you could watch. He flipped the switch and they crumpled up into little balls in 2-3 seconds. No charge.

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