NY - 25 cats found dead in bags were killed by blows to head

[CHERIE.T]

My heart breaks reading about such mean, evil deeds!

 

[chaotic_idealism]

Stories like this actually scare me for for many reasons. I even scare myself, if I ever witnessed someone doing that... I fear I'd actually enjoy beating his/her head in, myself, with a baseball bat. Shiver.

I've thought about that some myself--I've come to the conclusion that I have the potential to be cruel, given the right situation; but I've also come to understand that cruelty is something that literally anyone is capable of. It's not a matter of being a good person or a bad person; it's a matter of deciding whether to be cruel or kind. Things like this happen not because somebody is bad or insane; it's because, for a long time, they make choices to be cruel, until finally they become capable of doing something that would horrify the average person. Everyone is capable of becoming either a monster or a saint. Most of us end up somewhere in the middle. It all comes down to who you want to be.

So, yeah, you might feel like you'd enjoy beating someone's head in with a baseball bat, if you caught them killing an animal. However, I'm assuming that you are a person who has decided to be kind, rather than cruel; disciplined, rather than impulsively violent. It's that decision--not emotions, which are instinctive and hard to control--that determines what kind of a person you are. In this case, it means that you could look past your anger and decide to turn in an animal killer to the police, rather than going for your baseball bat, because you are a civilized person and you believe in justice. If you weren't, you probably wouldn't be here.