Nellie - Human nature?

Ok! Hey, everybooth. It's WEDNESDAY WEDNESDAY GOTTA GET DOWN ON WEDNESDAY.

...sorry.


I'd just like to make it clear that, while I know how Wednesday is pronounce, every time I see it in writing I think  of it as wed-nez-day. Every. Time.

Today I'm going to talk to yo about animal cruelty!
I got a whole pile of books out from the library, (Including one outstanding graphic novel, one good graphic novel, one crap graphic novel and a couple normal novels) and the one I'm really psyched about and just generally gaga over is "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat" by Hal Herzog- tagline "Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals". I saw it on the shelf in all it's lurid coloring and I fell in love instantly.

DFSDGF- JUST LOOK AT IT <3

Of course, once I was done plowing through the graphic-novel-goodness, this was the first proper book I started reading. I'm 42 pages in at the moment and, in this case, you can judge a book by it's cover.

It's already touched on a few really interesting subjects- Dolphin Assisted Therapy, for instance. As someone who doesn't think dolphins should be kept captive at all, well, putting them into little concrete pools so people with real problems can float above them and pretend their sonar is bathing them in radiant wonderful mind-healing rays? For $700 bucks an hour? The levels of stupidity and meanness there are off the charts.

BUT. The part that has been most interesting to me so far is the section on the correlation (and there always has been one, allegedly) between a child showing cruelty to animals and that child growing up to commit violent crimes towards other people.

It's long been "common knowledge" that torturing animals as a child is a sign of a psychopath, but in one study cited by this book, 35% of the violent criminals participating had abused animals in the past, and in the control group- and these are normal people, you understand- 37% had committed some form of animal cruelty as children.
In another surprising study, out of 354 cases of serial murder, only 20% of the perpetrators had a history of animal abuse. Huh. May want to re-think that common knowledge thing.

That being said, it isn't why I'm writing. As I'm reading this section, the author asks some of his friends if they ever abused animals as children. The results are surprising- one friend blew up frogs with firecrackers, another killed his puppy when he was five years old by tossing it over a fence again and again, a third said that yes, she had indeed been involved in animal cruelty when she was a child- but she couldn't talk about it.

The part that disturbs me is that a fair amount of people abuse, torture, or kill animals as children. Up to a certain age, I suppose you can justify it- oh, he/she didn't know they were hurting them- but the rate at which this happens is so startling that when reading this section of the book, I was struck by how glad I was that I never killed anything when I was a kid. All of these people, all of the good ones, anyhow, carry around the weight of having done something horrible when they were younger, and having no way to fix it. They have to remember that their entire lives.

I stepped on a snail three years ago, when I was fifteen. It still brings me to tears to think about.

I was talking to my Dad about all of this, and a few minutes into the conversation he asked me if I wanted to hear about the worst moment of his life.

He had a little japanese turtle named Yogi when he was a kid- he had a lot of snakes, rats, turtles, etc- that he  was especially fond of, no bigger than the palm of your hand. One day, while he was cleaning the cage, he accidentally forgot Yogi was on the ground and stepped on him. You could tell, from the way he talked about this, that he hadn't been joking or exaggerating- years and years and years after the fact, he still remembers killing that little turtle, and feels incredibly guilty.

So, in conclusion to all of this, are people just generally messed up? Do all kids need to kill or torture something when they're young, just to know how it feels to have power over something that can't fight back? Obviously, some don't, and the ones who do often seem to be wracked with guilt- but why does it happen so often? And why am I exempt from all of this? (Thank goodness!) Is it just good genetic material that kept me from wanting to pull the legs off of grasshoppers? NATURE OR NURTURE, PEOPLE?

Also, purebred dogs and their owners really do look alike, but mutts and their owners do not. Go figure.

o-o