Man who fed puppy to boa gets 90 days in jail

MSNBC ^ | June 14, 2007 | AP

[Ditter]

Mark, I have dogs that catch baby rabbits and eat them. I don’t like it and try to stop them but they are dogs and I can’t stop them just like cats. Dogs do what dogs do. The difference is I don’t go out and trap the bunnies so I can watch my dogs swallow them whole or tear them apart.

Keeping a snake as a pet is sick and weird, IMHO, but feeding them live animals is just plain sick. I understand that is the way the snake does it in the wild so it goes back to my first point, people who keep snakes for pets are sick.

[SALChamps03]

CRUELTY towards animals is one gauge of one’s depravity towards HUMAN life. If you’re sadistic enough to put a kitten on a BBQ (as recently happened) or throw someone’s dog into traffic in a case of road rage (which happened in CA a few years back) then you deserve to be punished.

That's kind of a "Minority Report" attitude isn't it? I'm certainly not defending what he did. However, when and if he commits a crime against another human being, then there are laws in place to punish him. I am not advocating what he did. I'm saying jail time is inappropriate.

[fortheDeclaration]

“No one should be allowed to own an animal that feeds on other animals.”

Then cats should be illegal. My daughter’s cat is always killing something and leaving its remain on our porch. I know if that wild animal was big enough she’d eat me too, but only after toying with me for a long time while I was injured and near death, like she does with all the birds and mice and chipmunks and whatever else she find to kill.

Unless the cat is being used to keep down the mice population,(farms) he should be kept inside or have a bell put on him so he doesn't kill birds.

[fortheDeclaration]

No one should be allowed to own an animal that feeds on other animals.

That would exlude kittens and puppies as pets. They eat meat. Sure it arrives in the house in a can, but it was alive once.

That is a far cry from letting the animal eat another live animal, which is what someone who gets a snake has to feed it.

[TKDietz]

A short stint in jail might help provide a little attitude adjustment for some people. Otherwise, about the only thing locking people up is good for is keeping the really dangerous ones away from the rest of us for a while. Our prisons and jails are overflowing because we lock so many up for stupid reasons. We’ve gone absolutely nuts with locking people up over the last 30 years or so. We hit an all time record per capita incarceration rate back in 1979 and since the per capita incarceration rate and total number of people behind bars in this country has gone up several fold. We can’t keep that many really bad folks locked up for a really long time now because there isn’t enough room for them and we’re running out of money to keep building new prisons and jails. There’s hardly any room for murders and rapists and the like now in our prisons and jails and you want to lock more people up for stupid stuff like this? That’s just crazy.

I think it’s rotten to be unnecessarily cruel to animals. I love my dog. I don’t care much for my daughters’ cats, but I’d never do anything cruel to them. People that are just cruel to animals for the sake of being cruel ought to get some sort of punishment for that. But if they have some sort of legitimate reason, like using the animal for food, for human consumption or for another pet that has a diet of live animals, I can’t really put that into the category of “unnecessary cruelness.” I wouldn’t own a snake, and if I did own one I sure as heck wouldn’t feed it puppies. I think what this guy did is creepy, but it’s not really in my mind the same as being cruel to another animal for the sake of being cruel. The snake has to eat, and if you have a puppy that’s going to go to the pound anyway, I guess it’s as good a meal as any for the snake. If you have a bunch of puppies you can’t take care of and you take them to the animal shelter, chances are that most of them will be euthanized, killed. They’ll die anyway and absolutely no good will come of it, except there will be less orphan dogs running around causing a nuisance. At least a pet snake got a meal from this puppy. I wouldn’t do this to a puppy and I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who does this sort of thing, but if I step back and try to be objective I can’t see that much of a difference in feeding puppies to your snake or something like rabbits, or even rats.