"It's dead, bitch!"

[dhex]

A heartless kitty killer hissed angrily at animal rights activists Wednesday, grinning widely as she took credit for stuffing the helpless pet into a 500-degree oven.

"It's dead, bitch!" snapped an unrepentant Cheyenne Cherry, sticking her tongue out after a plea bargain that will put her behind bars for a year in the May 6 killing of tiny Tiger Lily.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/07/15/2009-07-15_cheyenne_cherry_taunts_animal_activists_after_getting_plea_deal_killing_kitten_i.html

[pilot]

Wow, that is cold. Somehow the comments section has veered into a liberal versus conservative non-debate.

R.I.P. TIGER LILY

[Llydis]

Because every issue has to be a conservative vs. liberal debate. It's the natural order of things!

[isfet]

killing animals is only wrong when we think they're cute and housebroken

[dhex]

it's that whole peter sanger expanding circle thing.

not having grown up with pets beyond fish and hamsters, i don't have that same kind of attachment to dogs and cats most people have. i like them and all, but they're not very invested with "personhood" as it were.

[Llydis]

I don't think it's really investing in their personhood as much as it is wondering what kind of person would be that cruel to something else.

If anything, she was trying more to intimidate the person she had a falling out with that involved an innocent 3rd party to the whole thing. I think I'm far more concerned if she could do that to a kitten, then what could she have done to a small child?

[dhex]

well, no, i tend to agree with singer on this. as isfet points out, some thing are more "people like" than others, with "cuteness" as a huge pull. personhood is more easily conferred on social animals (dogs, cats) that humans socialize with, and some they don't (wolves, bears, anything "cute"); they are, in turn, privileged against most reptiles and amphibians, and certainly most fish*; all of which are privileged above insects, even highly social insects like bees and ants.

the reason that someone cooking a kitten seems more evil than, say, gassing a roach with an aerosol poison is that the kitten fits into our "expanding circle" (to use singer's terminology) of what counts as a "being" thus coming closer to a kind of personhood with at least some nominal notion of rights. (general under the guise of some kind of human protection, simply because animals obviously don't have any kind of agency of rights themselves; you cannot charge a kitten with murder for killing a bird, etc etc and so forth, and you're applying human concepts to non-human actions.)

we are cruel to insects all of the time, excepting the jains. do any of us hesistate to kill a mosquito? and yet they are beings with lives.

think of it as a big ole x-axis, with "PERSON" on the left side and "INSENSATE OBJECT" on the right side. everything sits upon that scale.

* least vegan dish ever is a sechuzan dish where a live fish is poached in hot oil, covered in cooked vegetables and served still gasping for air.

[dmauro]

* least vegan dish ever is a sechuzan dish where a live fish is poached in hot oil, covered in cooked vegetables and served still gasping for air.

I've made a less vegan dish before.

I'm sure this girl is not so stupid as to put a child in the oven because whether or not she feels any affinity towards babies, she knows that she could go to jail for murder, and if her friend put a baby in the oven, she probably knows she could go to jail as an accomplice for not taking the baby out of the oven. She probably did not realize she could go to jail for a year for not taking a kitten out of an oven though. Hell, I'm surprised about that too.

Also, you have to consider there is a huge difference between a kitten and your enemy's kitten.

edit:

wondering what kind of person would be that cruel to something else.

To answer the question directly: most humans in the history of our race.

[Llydis]

I'm not arguing that she'd put a child in an oven per se, but there are just other things she could do to a child.

[dhex]

I've made a less vegan dish before.

man, the only thing less vegan than serving a still-living fish you just flash poached would be grinding up a mama cow and force feeding it its own baby.

[dmauro]

I'm not arguing that she'd put a child in an oven per se, but there are just other things she could do to a child.

Are you pro choice? Like dhex said, this is all on a sliding scale that's different for everyone. I know people who won't kill bugs, and my brother kills other humans.

I've made a less vegan dish before.

man, the only thing less vegan than serving a still-living fish you just flash poached would be grinding up a mama cow and force feeding it its own baby.

If you were there for it, you would probably would have agreed it was pretty brutal. I won't get into it since it could potentially get me into trouble apparently.

[Llydis]

I'm pro choice, although I don't like abortion.

Weird, I know, but It's not up for me to decide who gets an abortion and why they would abort.

[dark steve]

who "likes" abortion though, I mean seriously

[dhex]

if you press enough buttons people will slip into "parasite" mode pretty quickly. that's more a function of escalated rhetoric than anything else, the flipside of zygote = living, breathing human or whatever. it gets ugly real quick, as would be expected.

back to the original story, there's a lot of underlying class conflict at work here, too. "animal rights" as a show up and protest hobby are a kind of luxury.

personally, her previous convictions aside, i'm not sure that this should be a "go to jail" sort of crime. fine, yeah. perhaps even community service or some kinda indentured servitude for six months to the aspca or whatever. but going to jail? i dunno.

If you were there for it, you would probably would have agreed it was pretty brutal. I won't get into it since it could potentially get me into trouble apparently.

now you're just being a cocktease. or a cruel-tease. not sure what the technical term would be.

[pilot]

To clarify, I think it's sad, but not like, she iced a baby sad. I would be sad if somebody roasted our cat but I wouldn't expect such a public outcry!

It was sort of amazing to me when we were in the process of getting our cat the amount of time and effort we saw spent on running the no-kill cat shelter she came from. I love wittle kitties and I love having her but man what if they spent the same amount of time helping out people? To me animal rights people always seemed a little selfish... or just totally out-of-touch.