Posted on 03/22/2002 9:49:10 AM PST by areafiftyone
White Plains, New York-AP) -- A former prison guard who killed five kittens in a trash compactor at Sing Sing has been sentenced to a year in jail. A judge said the crime was ``so offensive and so calculated and so gratuitously cruel it diminishes the humanity of everybody.''
Forty-eight-year-old Ronald Hunlock had been convicted of aggravated cruelty to animals. Last March he found an inmate with contraband at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. He then searched the inmate's cell, found five newborn kittens and their mother and told the inmate to put them in the compactor. The inmate refused, so Hunlock did it himself.
The mother cat escaped but the kittens were crushed. Defense attorney Daniel Gallivan had asked the judge not to impose jail time, and said Hunlock thought the cats were ill and had no other recourse.
Actually, what prompted me to post my original comment was Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. There's a section where he mentions that the National Assembly (???)in France at the time was composed of mid- to low-level bueracrats who benefited from litigiousness in their society and were resentful to a degree, and thus they fostered the Revolution to throw property into dispute.
I wouldn't say that without knowing the person first-hand, but it's a strong indicator of inhumanity.
No you can't. You cannot torture or cruelly kill even your own pets.
In any event I think 1 year is pretty excessive. Restitution in cases of theft of this type works better.
I am in favor of any sentence over one year, even by a day, since that falls into felony category and will prevent the person from owning a firearm legally. And this prevention is something I wish to see, inasmuch as the guard has shown a certain depraved indifference to living things and their welfare.
And it's not about theft, it's about cruelly killing animals for no good reason.
He should have gotten one year for each kitten.
GSA(P)
Animals are property. No more, no less. no matter what PETA says.
You cannot be cruel to property. (even if that behavior is repugnant and very wasteful of resources it is still just someone dealing with their own property)
GSA(P)
You can according to the constitution. Animals are property. How you deal with your property is up to you.
GSA(P)
As far as public ordinances and state laws admit, that is.
by David Dieteman
According to some, it is immoral to eat animals. Instead, animal rights advocates contend that animals must be treated ethically, by which it is meant that animals should be treated as if they are human beings.
There is, of course, one large problem with such a view: animals are not human beings.
In the process of proposing such silliness, animal rights advocates destroy the rational distinction between man and the rest of the animal kingdom. In doing so, they not only abuse reason, but dullen the moral senses which protect human beings from abuse.
First, consider the idea that human beings must act ethically toward animals. Although this might sound unobjectionable at first – who, after all, condones the pointless torture of animals? – the Devil is in the details. What the animal rights crowd means is not that one should not be cruel to animals, but rather than animals should be treated like your mother, i.e., like fellow human beings. By way of rebuttal, consider the following anecdote from the life of Ben Franklin. As Jeffrey Smith notes in Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic, Franklin was a vegetarian in his youth, "believing that killing animals was 'a kind of unprovok'd Murder.' Later, however, Franklin "was tempted by the smell of fish being fried. Having seen small fish in the stomachs of fish being prepared, he decided he could eat them if they ate each other."
This anecdote gets to the heart of the silliness of "animal rights." Animals do not treat each other as if they had rights, i.e., they do not conform themselves to human moral conduct. Were a man to eat another man, in the way in which a large fish eats a smaller fish, this would be the crime of murder. And yet no one seriously contends that a fish commits a crime by eating another fish. Animals eat other animals. So long as they do so, there is no rational justification for human beings not to eat animals as well. Humanity faces a moral decision: imprison all predators, or pass the hamburgers.
Similarly, if animals are to be treated ethically, then human beings are entitled (in the strong sense of the term) to expect ethical treatment in return. For that matter, animals should be required to serve on juries like other citizens, and pay their taxes. They can earn a living, rather than simply take, take, take all the time. We should expect them to go to church, rather than laying around at home or running around the yard all weekend.
Bears eat other animals. Bears also eat fish. That being said, there is no reason why I cannot eat the same type of animals eaten by the bear, or the same fish. There is similarly no reason why I cannot morally kill and eat the bear. Fair is fair.
More importantly, in seeking to have human beings treat animals as if they are human beings, the animal rights movement defeats its own arguments. In other words, the animal rights sophists demonstrate their own lack of understanding of morality by arguing that morality should extend to non-moral beings, namely, animals.
One of my friends, who is an avid hunter, has a ready reply when anti-hunting types ask if he shoots "innocent" animals. "No," he replies, "only the guilty ones." The point is that the concepts of guilt and innocence do not apply to animals. The net effect of the animal rights movement, then, is not to do the impossible, i.e., to raise animals to the level of the human, but to lower humans to the level of the merely animal. The result of Peter Singer's claim that "a dog is a rat is a pig is a boy" is that children are now exterminated as if they were rats. Abortion on demand, anyone?
One of the strangest cases that I read in law school was Taylor v. Johnston, 15 Cal.3d 130, 123 Cal. Rptr. 641, 539 P.2d 425 (1975). Although it is a breach of contract case, it stands out in my memory because it was a case concerning horse abortions. Yes, horses get aborted. In particular, horses are aborted in the case of twinning. As the court wrote,
Shortly after their breeding, it was discovered that both mares were pregnant with twins. In thoroughbred racing twins are considered undesirable since they endanger the mare and are themselves seldom valuable for racing. Both mares were therefore aborted. However, plaintiff was not required to pay the $20,000 stud fees for Chateaugay's services because neither mare delivered a live foal.
Where does the animal rights crowd come down on horse abortion? One wonders.
Mr. Dieteman is an attorney in Erie, Pennsylvania, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at The Catholic University of America. This article first appeared on the Lew Rockwell website (www.lewrockwell.com) on August 20, 2001.
Incorrect. You may not utilize your property in such a way as to present undue dangers for others; for example, you may not set fire to your house arguing that it is your property and you may deal with it as you wish. You may not torture animals or engage them in animal fighting contests.
The Constitution provides mechanisms for writing laws, and laws have been written to outlaw some of the behaviors described above. Since the Supreme Court has not stricken these laws down as unconstitutional, it is assumed by the law enforcement agencies and courts that they are constitutional.
People should be punished for damaging or destroying another man's property. And I do see the rise of the "animal rights" movement as a culmunation of decades of evolutionary thought. Why is that so difficult to understand? We have already passed the point where many consider animals more important than humans.
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