I saw recently this news item where a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Colorado City, AZ found on his doorstep a tiny kitten that, while still alive, had been encased up to its head in cement. He took this as a warning sign from the members of the cult to leave town.
Although the kitten was rushed to an animal shelter, they could not save its life. I was so sickened by this story of unbelievable and pointless cruelty to a harmless animal that I could not even bring myself to blog about it because just to think about it, let alone write about it, made me so furious. What is the matter with these people?
But from reader Ginger I learn that in response to this heinous act, the Cleveland Skeptics have set a goal of raising $1,000 for the Best Friends Animal Society that supports homeless, neglected, and abused animals in Utah.
I hope people will help in any way they can. (Update and warning: There is a sad photo and I am told that there is a very, very sad video in these links. I did not watch it myself because I was afraid of what it showed but I was told that readers should be warned about it.)
How about we find every one of those mother fucking “authorities” in Colorado City who thought this was funny, knock them out, stick them in blocks of cement up to their necks, and dump them on the front porches of their houses? Wouldn’t that be fucking hi-larious?
No, it wouldn’t, because that’s cruel and unusual punishment, and they are human, at least in some sense. I swear, I fucking hate assholes like this because they make me a worse person.
I had that same thought Shawn. Minus the part about knocking them out first. Fucking sickos :/
Somedays I wish desperately that there were a hell for people who did things like this, and for the people who thought it was funny, to go to.
Fyi there is a very disturbing picture of the kitten on the link the article. You might want to include a warning. I’m not mad that you didn’t or anything, but I’m glad I’m crying in the privacy of my own home rather than at work.
Thanks for letting me know. I have inserted a warning on the basis of what you said, even though I could not bring myself to watch it.
Yeah, I wouldn’t watch the video either.
You know that the authorities in the area where this occurred and the people who did this consider themselves good Christian people -- torturing animals to death is just a jolly healthy passtime for them.
Thanks. I couldn’t watch it either. The picture was more than enough.
I wish I had enough money to pay for him to have security cameras installed. Or net traps. Or snake pits. :/
Mano-
I updated the Cleveland Skeptics link and the link to the donation page to remove all graphic pictures and video. I replaced the video with one about Best Friends and the picture on the donation page with one of my own kitten from a year ago because the one in the video reminds me of her and it makes me ill. I added warnings myself to my links to the HuffPo article.
Thank you so much for posting this. We are 56% of the way there!
It’s acts like this that make me wonder if the human species is worth saving. It’s one of the reasons I don’t give a shit about global warming. Would it really be so bad if homo sapiens sapiens finally went the way of mastodons and dinosaurs? If it meant seeing an end to the shitty religions that plague the world and wreak violence upon innocent lives, both human and animal, then I can’t see the point of being upset about end-of-the-world scenarios wherein nature does the job of controlling the planet’s biggest parasites, because we refuse to do it ourselves.
That’s what I think in my more cynical moments. Most of the time, though, I can’t help but hope that maybe such cruelty will become nothing but a remnant of a horrific past that will no longer reside in the memories of the living, but only in history books. It makes me sad that I will not live to see such a future, assuming it ever happens.
Amen, silverbuttons. I hold similar thoughts. I feel sadness, though, about the level of suffering that global warming will bring for our children, grand-children, and (if we get that far) great-grandchildren.
I’m a lifelong Utah resident and it’s well known that you avoid the FLDS enclaves. They are violent, clannish and cruel. My parents were in Southern Utah, Northern Arizona a few years ago, needed gas and drove into Colorado City -- the entire time they were in town, a police car followed them. Down the street, to the gas station, to the grocery store and back out of town.
I should feel sorry for the FLDS folks but I can’t. They are products of a vicious subculture that treats children brutally and badly. That someone raised inside that culture would treat a kitten that badly is unsurprising. There is a whole generation of “lost boys” -- young men kicked out of FLDS towns who have no skills to survive in the world, who have been simply sent away and cut off from everything they’ve ever known. They’re so screwed up by how they’ve been mistreated they can’t function in the real world. It’s a very real problem in Utah. And there’s no solution since we let them call it religion and get away with treating women and children like property.