The Glade 4.0

I think that this case has too many complicating factors to be the best example of the issue you're concerned about.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Everything in the world is a clean set of Boolean variables, and my arbitrary conditional statements are clearly superior to whatever it is the rest of you use to make decisions. You should all be sanctioned for arriving at different conclusions.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

In my experience working as a vet tech and putting down lots of animals, and having had to deal with the aftermath of people who *thought* they could get a clean kill with a shot to the head...

I would consider a shot to the head as a means of putting down an animal a last resort, and rarely a humane method of termination. Unless you really know what you're doing, the chance of a great deal of extra suffering is quite large, and you'd be amazed at how long a dog (or horse, or cow) can survive a poorly aimed or imperfect shot to the head, and it will cause a great deal of pain in the process.

I'm more familiar with this with horses, and have had friends who have had to resort to both shooting and cutting the throat of a horse. Neither were good experiences, and haunted them years later. Both were cases of absolute necessity, wherein the horse had a broken leg miles out into the wilderness on a solo trail ride.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Gotta double-tap.

Probably should have taken advantage of the service dog...

http://fox8.com/2017/05/07/ex-soldier-r ... ound-dead/

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The more I look at this, the more I think the boyfriend is a sadistic whacko that took advantage of her mental illness to fulfill some sort of sadistic instinct.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I agree the circumstances are what raises flags and sounds alarms.

While you raise valid points about moral duty and mitigating suffering, it's important to remember that as a society we are less than 200 years out from determining that it's inappropriate to own other human beings as property and treat them in the manner that this dog was treated. As a species, we still haven't all caught on to that idea. Building a comprehensive moral framework for the humane treatment of nonhuman life is a rather tall task.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Perhaps true, but the fact is that we don't need all that comprehensive a moral framework. We just need a reasonably coherent one that society in general can get on board with. Society, in general, can't get on board with making animals fight for amusement, but we also can't get on board with mandatory veganism for "ethical" reasons. One involves being cruel to a living creature for pleasure, on the flimsy justification of property rights for the sake of property rights. It takes a genuine idiot to think "I can't force dogs to fight to the death ends in FULL COMMUNISM!!"

On the other hand, the other end of the spectrum involves an authoritarian intrusion into a daily, basic life function. Forget birth control and sex; vegans are far worse than social conservatives- they want to control what you eat. Everyone does that three times a day. Furthermore, people should, to the greatest reasonable degree, enjoy what they eat. Enjoying one's common daily activities is a positive good to people; important to their long-term health and well-being.

There is, however, a good degree of freedom in between to settle on something. Whatever we settle on will inevitably have minor inconsistencies, but these inconsistencies are invariably of far greater significance in internet debates than they are in their actual effects on anything.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Those are not both 3 times a day activities?

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Look at this guy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Again, I point out that as a species, we haven't all gotten on board with the humane treatment of other human beings. If you total up the humans that view women as the property of their husbands and/or fathers who can be beaten or killed if they behave in a fashion that their owners find undesirable, you exceed half a billion people. This is a significant portion of humanity. It stands to reason that an even larger portion of humanity will find it perfectly acceptable to make animals fight to the death for the lulz.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Probably true, but I still find myself rather unable to muster sympathy for her. My main hope at this point is that the prosecutors find a way to pin her death on him so he gets the level of punishment he deserves.

This is an only semi-relevant point, though, because "humanity" isn't a homogenous group. The prevalence of such attitudes is not even close to evenly distributed. When we talk about society, we are talking about the advanced nations that are our peers or our nation, or even only part of our nation. That half billion people exists almost entirely outside any of these groups.

As a general rule, it's wise to avoid making points based on what "humanity" thinks or does. It is very rare that there's sufficient commonality across humanity for such points to withstand scrutiny.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Given some of the people you've expressed sympathy for in the past, I'm surprised that you don't have sympathy for someone who was only 23 and already this badly damaged that she either felt she had to, or was talked into (or both) killing her therapy dog, and then killing herself.

Somehow, though, I suspect no one had any sympathy for her. She was a female veteran with mental health issues, and while I'm not normally too sympathetic to "women's issues", there IS a real problem at the VA with both dealing with mental health issues and realizing that female veterans are in fact veterans.* I have this feeling someone just threw a therapy dog at the problem and called it good, although that seems to be the popular thing to do these days, VA or not.

*Women veterans often aren't even recognized as veterans at the VA until they practically bash someone over the head with their DD214. There's supposedly efforts to improve "women's healthcare" at the VA, but I suspect this will consist entirely of throwing money at a system that can't schedule appointments, and extra efforts to provide birth control and abortions, because we all know as long as the **** is taken care of, that's all female veterans care about for their healthcare, amirite?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

A lot more on this story here: http://popularmilitary.com/exclusive-ow ... -happened/

Apparently, it wasn't a service animal and it wasn't even her dog. It was her soon-to-be ex-husband's dog.

Yeah, I have a really low tolerance for deliberate cruelty (as opposed to actions where the harm is incidental) and generally don't accept any excuses for it. Out of curiosity, what are the contrary expressions of sympathy you're thinking of? As a policy matter, I generally favor rehabilitative punishment over retributive punishment, but that's different than gut-level emotions.

If that article is correct, then I give even less of a flying **** that she killed herself, and I really, really hope her accomplice gets the book thrown at him in every way possible. **** them both.

This article is mostly just the assertions of the estranged husband, and it makes some fundamental errors such as:

- Animals can't be murdered
- Animals can't be military dependents
- Going to Korea isn't an undesirable assignment (necessarily; some love it, some hate it) or a punishment for failing Airborne School (although failing airborne is pretty weak)

For a website billing itself as military-specific it shouldn't be making mistakes like that.

Also, it points out that she had multiple severe mental disabilities that got her an 80% rating and put out of the military. Assuming that's true, we are indeed talking about someone who had serious problems and wasn't getting any help, and she was only 23 years old. My daughter is older than that.

I wasn't thinking of any specific examples of people you've taken up for in the past, but for you to suddenly go all "personal responsibility, cruelty, yeah she had mental issues but **** her" over a dog is really pretty strange. It's rather out of character for you, but this isn't something she had a history of, or really all that egregious an example of animal cruelty as they go.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."