Serial Killers

I'm also not sure that dogfighting, cruel as it is, fits into the diagnostic criteria of cruelty to animals (institutional/group- there's a technical term for this but I can't remember it- vs individual actions). Vick's alleged killing of his failed dogs though, might.

Dumdog, I wouldn't worry TOO much about the kiddo, to be honest- it sounds like a normal pissykid answer to a large extent. I also think it's not very responsible of you to lump in hunting with animal cruelty. Most hunters are very much pro conservation, pro stewardship and ethical in their practices. Yes, there are a small minority who are in it for the guts and cause pain to animals. There are idiots who will speed up to run over critters in the road, too. Doesn't make drivers bad.

Kids develop empathy over time so in the case of a kid who seems to think that hurting other animals is fun, I wouldn't freak out automatically, but I would always express my personal disapproval for that behavior and continue to help the child develop emotionally to where they can begin to understand that other creatures feel the same things you do. But kids aren't born with that knowledge. Failing to ever develop empathy is sociopathy, and sociopaths may never become killers but they can cause a lot of pain to a lot of people in their lives.

And then there were kids like me who FREAKED OUT over the other kids doing normal kid bug-squashing/cat-poking things. I totally ratted my cousin out once for squashing lightning bugs (becasue the smear is so glowy and cool) when I was like 5 and he was 7ish. I was so totally horrified that anyone would ever even consider doing that!

not to worry about me dissing hunters, i love to go hunting and have to face the opposition all the time []
i only meant that i wonder if he understands at this point what it means or knows the difference between hunting and killing.
i take my hunting seriously because thats how my dad and grandad took it. we didnt consider it a sport.. it was food. but i dont know how his parents and other adults around him teach him. at this village there are also a ton of stray cats that are unwelcome - thats what i heard in passing - so again... i wonder how THAT problem is dealt with and how he views it.

and yeah he was being a pissy kid because he got tattled on by his older brother, but when my husband had his talk with him Calvin was crying at one point saying "its ok to hurt them just a little!"
honestly i think he just doesnt understand the difference yet, OR hasnt been taught the difference. and the issue with the stray cats makes me wonder.. i can see from his point of view too. when we were kids my brother and i would hide behind trees and throw an acorn at the dog to see them jump up, look around curiously, then lay back down, but would hear us snickering then come over smiling..... stupid yes. but we were kids left alone with too much time on our hands - dont worry we didnt pelt the dog, we aimed at her tail.. amazing the things we did as kids but dont want our own kids doing.....

Thank you SO MUCH for posting this Bob.  I listen to Coast to Coast AM on the way home from work and heard this guy.  I was actually going to post his web site this morning but you beat me to it. 

I don't think I've ever heard anyone discussing this topic hit the nail on the head so many times in one interview.  That guy is AWESOME!

I completely and totally agreed with this guy 100%.  It was FANTASTIC to hear someone in the law enforcment community so hell bent on putting dog fighters in jail.

I guess you have to consider that in some groups of people, dogs are not considered sentient beings. They are considered very disposable property.

I personally know of two instances where dogs were sadistically abused by angry young men to "get back" at the young women who owned the dogs. One dog was thrown through a windshield of the woman's car (had to be euthanized) because she was cheating on him with the person who gave her the dog. The other dog (actually a puppy) was thrown into a hot oven to persuade the woman to come out of a locked bedroom with her baby. This dog survived but suffered a lot of treatment for painful burns on its feet. It's hard for these young men to understand why what they did was, at best, criminal, let alone sick and twisted.

Actually, if you dig back into history, Descartes didn't believe that dogs had emotions or intelligence and were just organisms that responded to stimuli. He would nail a dog to a wall and disembowel it to demonstrate that it's response was automatic and predictable. I wonder of his response would be automatic and predictable if someone did this to him. This wasn't an altogether normal belief for everyone at the time.  Voltaire has debates with Descartes about this very thing.  "I think, therefore, I Am" - hmmmm - I guess he felt the dogs didn't really exist.  

The examples you give of the young men both pretty clearly sound like sociopathy to me. Wanting to hurt the woman through hurting the dogs shows a lack of emapthy for both the women and the dogs. They clearly understood that hurting the dogs would hurt the women--that's why they did what they did. And they didn't care, they did it anyway. Whether or not you regard dogs as sentient feeling creatures, hurting or destroying something someone else loves in order to further your own cause points to a lack of empathy for one's own fellow human beings.

Anyway, this entire discussion reminded me of a book I've been meaning to read: [linkhttp://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/076791581X/artandlies-20]The Sociopath Next Door[/link] by Martha Stout. She posits that sociopaths make up 4% of the population. That 's 1 in 25 people. Be afraid, be very afraid.

ORIGINAL: Pwca

I'm also not sure that dogfighting, cruel as it is, fits into the diagnostic criteria of cruelty to animals (institutional/group- there's a technical term for this but I can't remember it- vs individual actions). Vick's alleged killing of his failed dogs though, might.

You have got to be joking. Watching dogs fight to the death, with one of their eyes hanging out of it's socket, pieces of it's mouth and ears ripped off, and chunks missing out of it's body, and cheering for the dog that a hoodlum has bet on  isn't animal cruelty?   I sure would like to know what you think is animal cruelty.  [sm=banghead002.gif]

ORIGINAL: sillysally

Thank you SO MUCH for posting this Bob.  I listen to Coast to Coast AM on the way home from work and heard this guy.  I was actually going to post his web site this morning but you beat me to it. 

I don't think I've ever heard anyone discussing this topic hit the nail on the head so many times in one interview.  That guy is AWESOME!

I completely and totally agreed with this guy 100%.  It was FANTASTIC to hear someone in the law enforcment community so hell bent on putting dog fighters in jail.

And it was nice to hear someone not try to gloss over what dog fighting is, as some minor problem that doesn't effect society in general.  The people that do this, in my opinion, are rotten to the core, and sooner or later will probably do something just as cruel to a person. 

guess you have to consider that in some groups of people, dogs are not considered sentient beings. They are considered very disposable property.

I personally know of two instances where dogs were sadistically abused by angry young men to "get back" at the young women who owned the dogs. One dog was thrown through a windshield of the woman's car (had to be euthanized) because she was cheating on him with the person who gave her the dog. The other dog (actually a puppy) was thrown into a hot oven to persuade the woman to come out of a locked bedroom with her baby. This dog survived but suffered a lot of treatment for painful burns on its feet. It's hard for these young men to understand why what they did was, at best, criminal, let alone sick and twisted.

Actually, if you dig back into history, Descartes didn't believe that dogs had emotions or intelligence and were just organisms that responded to stimuli. He would nail a dog to a wall and disembowel it to demonstrate that it's response was automatic and predictable. I wonder of his response would be automatic and predictable if someone did this to him. This wasn't an altogether normal belief for everyone at the time. Voltaire has debates with Descartes about this very thing. "I think, therefore, I Am" - hmmmm - I guess he felt the dogs didn't really exist.

 
THAT is just disgusting and makes me angry!Anyways I do beleive in the whole serial killer/animal abuser connection.I might have mentioned this before,but I'm not sure.I was watching a forensic file show and they were trying to figure out who murdered and decapitated a young women.Anyways they eventually caught this guy, what they found in his freezers was just disgusting!He had the heads of dogs and cats in his freezer and he called them his trophies,I was sooo disgusted.He would go to the animal shelter adopt a dog or cat kill it and then decapitate it!

ORIGINAL: diane303

I guess you have to consider that in some groups of people, dogs are not considered sentient beings. They are considered very disposable property.

I personally know of two instances where dogs were sadistically abused by angry young men to "get back" at the young women who owned the dogs. One dog was thrown through a windshield of the woman's car (had to be euthanized) because she was cheating on him with the person who gave her the dog. The other dog (actually a puppy) was thrown into a hot oven to persuade the woman to come out of a locked bedroom with her baby. This dog survived but suffered a lot of treatment for painful burns on its feet. It's hard for these young men to understand why what they did was, at best, criminal, let alone sick and twisted.

Actually, if you dig back into history, Descartes didn't believe that dogs had emotions or intelligence and were just organisms that responded to stimuli. He would nail a dog to a wall and disembowel it to demonstrate that it's response was automatic and predictable. I wonder of his response would be automatic and predictable if someone did this to him. This wasn't an altogether normal belief for everyone at the time.  Voltaire has debates with Descartes about this very thing.  "I think, therefore, I Am" - hmmmm - I guess he felt the dogs didn't really exist.  

Its unfortunate for the dogs, but the women involved with these pyschos are probably pretty lucky. Sooner or later, they would probably have been also subjected  to being tortured or killed by these 2 nut jobs. 

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

You have got to be joking. Watching dogs fight to the death, with one of their eyes hanging out of it's socket, pieces of it's mouth and ears ripped off, and chunks missing out of it's body, and cheering for the dog that a hoodlum has bet on  isn't animal cruelty?   I sure would like to know what you think is animal cruelty.  [sm=banghead002.gif]

Without getting into my own opinions, I don't think PWCA was saying it wasn't animal cruelty, just that it doesn't fit as well into the model of animal cruelty that usually precedes serial killing.  If I understood his/her point correctly, dogfighting (and other "sports" like cockfighting and bullfighting) tends to fall more into the sort of group cruelty demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Women who get involved with these monsters...hmmm....that's a whole different discussion. 

Going back to hunters.....a good hunter will never prolong a kill.  A good shot is immediate.  These butchers relish the fight.  The longer and more bloody the better.

I just finished a historical novel about Coney Island back during the turn of the century called "Dreamland".  In the book was discribed a different kind of dog fight between terriers and rats.  They woud put a terrier in the ring and let loose a bag of 10 or so rats.  The dog, of course would kill them.  They would dump another 10 or so rats...on and on.  The rats would smell the blood and fear and would start fighting back.  It was a contest of who would win out, the rats or the dog.  Many times the dog would lose.    How could someone do that to their dog?

DumDog, Your story about Calvin would have raised a huge red flag for me as well.
 
I don't think that any behavior that is destructive or potentially destructive to animals is a good sign. If a child says it's fun, then it's not a good sign and should be taken seriously. If the child was just saying that "in opposition" as rwbeagles suggests then the kid should be taught that saying things in opposition or definance should be a no-no.
 
(However, I basically can't stand kids which is why I try not to interact with them so my handling of that situation would probably be very bad. I especially don't have a lot of patience for "defiant" kids or liars.  Hmmmm... maybe that means I'm on my way to being a serial killer! lol! [])

ORIGINAL: houndsandjackals

ORIGINAL: Bobsk8

You have got to be joking. Watching dogs fight to the death, with one of their eyes hanging out of it's socket, pieces of it's mouth and ears ripped off, and chunks missing out of it's body, and cheering for the dog that a hoodlum has bet on  isn't animal cruelty?   I sure would like to know what you think is animal cruelty.  [sm=banghead002.gif]

Without getting into my own opinions, I don't think PWCA was saying it wasn't animal cruelty, just that it doesn't fit as well into the model of animal cruelty that usually precedes serial killing.  If I understood his/her point correctly, dogfighting (and other "sports" like cockfighting and bullfighting) tends to fall more into the sort of group cruelty demonstrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Sorry, but I don't see anyway that dogfighting can be considered a "sport". Anyone that can take a dog and throw in into  an enclosure and watch while  it gets ripped to shreds, is as cruel and as sadistic as one can get.

I'm not saying at ALL that it's not cruel. What I'm saying is that the 'bloodsports' don't fit into the psychological model of animal abuse in the same way as an individual torturing an animal. (For one thing, there's a different cultural basis. I'm not going to even START a relativistic cultural argument, I think it's cruel period, but the psychological twisting that produces a person who tortures an animal outside of that 'sport' context is more in line with the sociopathic stuff.)

Bobsk8, you're very frustrating to debate with, because you don't argue with facts, just emotions, and you're REALLY bad about the ad hominem attacks. Just saying.