I beat my dog for crapping on the rug, and punted his ass outside. I also had to shoot a hound who got into the chickens. Nothing you can do with a dog on a farm once he has the taste for that. How many years will that give me? I'm a Christian man who has never laid a hand on a woman or baby. Think I'm more likely to, before or after, the beating or shooting? Or just maybe I, like many others, know the difference between and animal and a human. There's not a big slippery slope between the LAW versus the man above, and the LAW versus people like me. Granted there's likely a big difference between this man and me, but not enough to keep a crazy PETA anti-humanist leftist happy.
You may well be eager to "grant" such a difference, in your case. That would make one of us.