Cathy & lioness, I agree with both of you. I was brought up in a home with guns & hunters. We where all taught way before 12 that you don’t hurt an animal & you do not shoot except to save a life or for food. If you hunted & your shot wasn’t clean you tracked the animal until you found it so it did not suffer. I never hunted because of my love for animals but even at my age i’n still pretty good with a gun but I sure know the rules.

Imo this was a kitten not ants & these kids should know the difference. That tree in the picture looks pretty big & it’s on a street in frount of houses so in my mind they were not even a little bit afraid of being caught. Imo kids should start being taught at a very early age about pain (when they fall & get hurt), suffering (when they or a friend get sick), Love, & etc. I can’t help wondering about the time, Halloween & a black cat & also since this was in the open if it was there first cat. Imo they are not being taught right at home & think they need to get caught & they & their family needs counseling for them to become decent adults & parents. Right now they got away with it so what is next?

none of the males i know who hunt and own guns are cruel to animals. however there are plenty of boys out there who do own guns and are cruel. there’s no point in that point. hunting is a means to an end- preferable for food often mixed with sport and not of it’s nature cruel. cruelty is an end in itself-. sadism-enjoying the pain of something in your control is a specific paraphilia- not the natural state of males.

saying boys will be boys gives sanction to rape ,murder, and cruelty against humans and animals because it’s ‘ natural’. another flimsy excuse for reprehensible behavior and lack of parenting that’s populated our society with selfish, thoughtless criminal sociopaths haphazardly leaving trails of destruction in the wake of their pathetic, twisted lives. this sort of thinking posing as anthropological/ sociological scientific ‘ fact’ has caused incalcuable misery and leads any society it crops up in to destruction.

would the nazis and hitler have been stopped in their genocidal path without violence? would love have cured them? brutes and tyrants only understand brutality and violence. it’s the only thing that can stop them. compassion is for the truly innocent-it’s the only ones it works on. if youre hanging cats from trees youre like a mad dog too far gone- probably best to put you down. if i catch anyone harming my animals i will hurt them not spin useless philosophical jack off about modern society vis a vis the hunter male motif.

when we no longer value power over others as the ultimate personal attainment for ANY human, male or female, and live in a society that has respect for life instead of an erotically charged, omnipresent worship of brute force as the end all and be all of living a valuable, worthwhile life we won’t be suffused in what is basically socially sanctioned( with a wink) cruelty. men have to stop worshiping themselves as god because they ain’t her. we live in a necrophilic society born of fear of our own helpless mortality. killing things and causing them pain is the way some opt to fight against their own relative impotence in the universe. it’s no wonder the cruelest of them all are more often then not the weakest of them all which shows up in their penchant for going after the helpless( such as relatively defenseless kittens) and preying on society’s weakest, least supported members( such as killers who target children and drug addled prostitutes).

~The Lioness

As a male, yes, when young I too “experimented” but never with anything more than ants. Seeing a squirrel once shot when I was young sickened me. I grew up intrigued by and loving animals and have enjoyed many years of animal companionship.

What these boys need is to be located and sat down and taught some lessons and here again, Tanya is right. I would also examine the home life these and like-minded boys have. Something important is missing from their upbringing. That’s the job of parenthood–to be the role-models, to lead, to educate, to nurture, to love. When parents fail, and the children have reached what society defines as “maturity” and “adulthood” it is too late for nurturing. That’s why our prisons overflow.

Girls when young are given dolls–there’s a serious point behind doing so and the hope is that through play, these girls will develop their innate sense of protection for the young and helpless.

When we as a society learn that boys–in a civlized society–no longer need to play with guns but could use, if not a doll, then perhaps an animal playmate to draw out their own innate sense of protecting the young and helpless–every bit present in boys as in girls–then we might begin to form a less violent society, a society where the compassionate in the male–and not the macho–is rewarded.

Regardless of whether this escalates, they need a lesson NOW.

It’s like they are exploring limits; life and death; pain and suffering. our boys do not hunt anymore, and maybe it’s a biological reaction to that, who knows.

but without more facts of the age of these “boys”, you need to remember the fact that kids are learning about life, about morality, about pain. *NOTHING* suggests that treating animals poorly when you are very young is a path towards moral degeneration. What is suggested is that if you do not ask “what were you doing” “why did you think that was an ok thing to do”, THEN you begin to have morality/social issues.

And nora, why do you hope something horrible happens to these boys? Do you really hate human beings this much?

How many other cats or animals have they hurt and not been caught??