As someone mentioned above, this is nowhere comparable to hunting. This is more akin to stabbing guinea pigs in a cage. Was that normal behaviour where you grew up?
The kid needs help.
Yes, kids kill animals, in fact, I have several Aussie friends who told me about playing cricket with Cane toads as the ball, or having Cane toad races across busy roads (the winner is the one whose toad makes it to the other side). Kids in Australia can kill Cane toads with impunity.
BUT
It takes a certain type of child to run away from their parents in the early hours of the morning and climb walls specifically to kill animals. Specifically, to kill rare indigenous animals in a country where kids are taught from a very early age how precious the native wildlife is.
Alice Springs is rural, isolated and there probably isn’t much for kids to do…but you have to be really bored before you start killing things for shits and giggles.
I see a future with a lot of psychometric testing, therapy and medication for him.
This is the crux of the problem - it is not at all typical for a child to feel like doing what this child did. That’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Children who “feel like” doing this kind of thing are at significantly higher risk for serious persisting antisocial behavior.
The famed sociopathic triad never had much in the way of empirical support and has not held up over time.
When I was a kid I used to shoot birds off of tree branches with my air rifle out of my bedroom window. But I would never have captured a bird and tortured it to death. Looking back on it now, killing birds just for the hell of it was kind of cruel and pointless, but I still think that is very different than actually smashing an animal to death. There really is a difference.
No, he doesn’t. You are kidding yourself if you believe he does and shortchanging him as a parent.
That is why he smears toothpaste on the wall. Because he is 4 and doesn’t know better yet.
I think that’s a popular false correlation. Most kids will kill a few small animals here and there. I know I did. They don’t all become serial killers.
But going on a rampage and bludgeoning several animals in the span of a few minutes is pretty fucked up.
Too good of a pun to not be commented on by any other poster. I at least, appreciated the effort.
There’s not a lot about it here, so do you want to enlighten us? Where should we be looking for this disproving of the theory?
Although I agree that it’s “a vital element of humanity”, I’m not so sure that compassion doesn’t need to be taught. Many fundamental, universal human behaviors, including language itself, are actually learned. Young children soak up the culture around them so quickly that even their parents may not realize it’s happening. I guess I would say that although compassion may not need to be consciously and deliberately taught, it probably does need to be learned.
More importantly, good behavior in general is learned. As Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party suggests, most children are well aware by age seven that certain behaviors are frowned on by their society (which for children is synonymous with their parents), and I would expect that in Australian culture that includes burglary, wanton cruelty to animals, and destruction of others’ property. So for this kid to have done all three of these things means one of the following is true:
[ul]
[li]He knows it’s wrong but doesn’t care.[/li][li]He knows it’s wrong but has an overwhelming desire to do it.[/li][li]He doesn’t know it’s wrong.[/li][/ul]
The first possibility suggests he’s a budding sociopath, the second suggests some other psychological issue, and the third suggests that he comes from a household in which such conduct is normal (i.e., an abusive environment). Unfortunately, all three are plausible. We really don’t have enough information to decide which is the case, but regardless, it’s hard for me not to think that with behavioral problems this bad, the kid’s gonna wind up in prison someday.
/armchair psych
I think the authorities should be investigated the kid’s family. Seven year olds are not going to naturally going to have that kind of anger built up inside them - they’re reacting to something that was done to them. One indicator of future killers is animal torture; but another indicator is a history of being abused and/or molested as a child.
Hey, it could have been a lot worse. The kid could have been deliberately slowing down the security line at the airport to prove a point.
You don’t understand. His favorite toy was an SUV.
I don’t know if that differences is as much as you think, in the mind of a 7-year-old. I once had a friend’s father ask to borrow my baseball bat so he could kill a snake on my lawn :dubious: And no, we don’t have dangerous reptiles in the area, he just really wanted to kill that snake.
Does the kid need guidance? Yes. Is this a sure sign of a budding sociopath? Somehow, I can’t believe that.
Thanks. I thought I was alone in thinking that focus should be on the parents here. Who the hell has a 7yo that jumps into a zoo and does as he wants for 30 minutes before his parents even notice? That kid could have died a dozen times in those 30 minutes. Where were they? At home, on the street? How do you not miss your child for half an hour?
As for the kid, I can see a self-fulfilling prophecy here. He will end up a criminal because he will grow up hearing people say he is one.
link, please?
As I said, feeding live lizards to a croc is not illegal at all and you could do it all day long so long as the animals are yours. So let us quit all this stupidity that it is inherently wrong. If he had done it at home with his own animals there would be nothing to tall about.
I will also repeat that I saw some young people feeding live little fishes to a bigger one who would come up slowly and take them in in one gulp. They were fascinated and enjoying it and I do not think they were psycopaths. AFAIK they were not doing anything illegal because one of them worked at that pet store. Are all these teenagers psycopaths?
What I find more disturbing here is the absolutist positions of right and wrong taken by people who seem to believe there is only one way to judge and that is theirs. Most of China, most of Asia, most of Africa, most of South America would laugh at the concern for a lizard shown here. And Americans of a century ago would have laughed too. As I said, in China you can see someone torturing an animal just for entertainment and nobody thinks anything of it. I walked past a bored young woman at a sales stand who was torturing a puppy just for her own entertainment and I was sickened. I asked my girlfriend if there was anything we could do and she said “no”. It’s her dog and she can do what she likes with it. The police will laugh at you if you call them. Animals are routinely mistreated in those countries and nobody thinks anything of it. It is a matter of culture and respect for animals is not in their culture. And I absolutely do not believe they are all psycopaths or serial killers.
In most other undeveloped countries the kid would be seen as a normal and curious kid and scolded not to do it but in America (and maybe some other developed countries) the kid is going to end up in counseling and made to believe there is something wrong with him.
There have been threads here about bullfighting and some have said you have to be sick to enjoy such a thing. And yet I believe you can enjoy watching a bullfight and be a normal person and not a psycopath.
Like PETA believe you have to be a psycopath if you eat meat, many Americans believe you have to be a psycopath if you enjoy a bullfight or anything else which makes an animal suffer.
It is even more ironic to observe this absolutist stance against violence on animals in a country which is so ready to inflict violence on its own people and on other peoples.
I truly fear those who are so certain of the moral superiority of their positions because that certainty gives them the justification to impose their views at gun point. “You have to agree with me that violence is unacceptable and if you do not agree with me then I will kill you and show you.”
If Abu Ghraib and Iraq and Dachau and Vietnam and Argentina and many other places have shown us is that many people will enjoy torturing and killing not only animals but other human beings just for the sheer power trip. Many people are ready to gloss over such things because “it’s war and in war shit happens” but tell them a boy stepped on lizard and they’ll call for lowering the age for the death penalty.
I am glad my parents were not like that because I would have ended up in counseling evry other day. I’d rather have a curious kid with initiative even if he sometimes gets into trouble than a conformist kid without initiative.
Ummm… I don’t think we want to go there. At least I don’t. 
This is a completely asinine summation of the issues here. Sounds like you had a soapbox in need of a rant.
As for doing this at home, of course bludgeoning animals and killing them for fun is always going to be problematic. Feeding a pet to keep it alive is not at all what this kid was doing, as much as you’d like to mischaracterize it. Why you want so badly to do so, I cannot fathom.
Sorry Sailor but that was not normal behavior. It was far beyond a normal right of passage. I am sure this kid will get psychiatric help due to this incident. He needs it.
How so? I’m not trying to be anti-hunting, I’m asking if you (or anyone) would articulate the difference between this and a good portion of hunting. While certainly there is higher functioning, civilized and mannered norms that get imposed on a lot of hunting–especially in modern times–but at the primal level, at the level where “endangered” has no cognizable meaning, what is the difference?
There game farms stocked with farm-raised birds that are only released into the wild when a paying hunter approaches. How is that not grown-up sticking knives into a hamster cage? There are… well, I could go on, but then this would take on the tenor of a screed against hunting. It’s not. I don’t think hunters should get counseling for their need to kill, but I think this kid does. But I’m hard pressed to articulate the difference.