[Pinkbell]

I realize that some people don’t go to jail as long for hurting people, but I think they should go to jail longer for hurting people. There are some people that deserve much longer in jail than they recieve. Anyway, I believe unnecessary cruelty towards animals is wrong, may it be the animals we eat, small animals, dogs/cats, and so on. There is a strong relationship between people who abuse animals eventually moving onto hurting people. If putting them in jail can lead to them no longer abusing animals and in turn prevent them from moving onto different sorts of victims, then I think it should be done.

I know different cultures deem different animals worthy of protection. Western Culture happens to deem dogs and cats worthy of protection, and the dog has been a great help via rescue, the blind, those with seizures, bringing comfort to the ill, and even sniffing out bombs and drugs. Vets and pet stores would never recommend feeding a dog or cat to a snake. They would recommend feeding an animal of the rodent variety to a snake. Sure, a snake will eat anything, but it doesn’t mean it should be given everything.

That’s horrible as far as the chickens. I have heard of farms that treat them very humanely until their death and feed them natural grains as opposed to steroids. I don’t eat veal because it is a baby cow, and the idea of eating a baby cow makes me sick.

[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.