Your revision clearly makes more sense.
There was a time, in the not too distant past, when such cruelty was commonplace, and its consequences rarely thought of, as animals of all kinds were just - things.
Compassion is a learned skill, not necessarily present in very young children, or those of whom have never had much in the way of moral or ethical instruction. There are wide swathes of humanity in which this degree of skilled empathy has never been reached, mobs of all kinds, and revolutionaries of every stripe. It is the kind of mind set that can condemn anyone, or anything, to a life of trepidation, pain and early death. Civilization has been one painful step after another to alleviate or eliminate this kind of gratuitous cruelty and indifference to the pain of another.
And yet, that is exactly the kind of thinking that the Islamic hordes seem to gear themselves to from birth. There is sometimes no reasoning that will engage their capacity for critical thinking.
I’m 64 and never treated an animal like that, never knew anyone who did, and would have thought very badly of anyone who did that sort of thing, even when I was a child.