justanoldvet, after pondering this situation a little more, I’ve decided that your best bet may be to use Master Wang-Ka’s patented technique for getting rid of neighborhood nuisances.
I told you someone would have a better idea than mine.
I haven’t laughed that hard in ages.
Has my deterrent beat all to hell and gone!
Wonderful!
If you wanna have a little blast from the past you could also go this route. Lots of great alternatives there as well.
After that I hate to have a sensible suggestion, but I think you should approach your local politician. City council rep, selectman, at that level. Taking care of local annoyances is their job.
The problem is that they’re often lacking in genuine Toledo steel. But hey, if it works, it works.
Holy crap! That’s a future serial killer there! The punishment he received was certainly no deterrent. Kids like that need counseling and he’s obviously not going to get it until he crosses that final line and then it will be too late.
How well trained are your dogs? You might try training them not to take food until you give them the correct command. Even if they never go outside without you, by training them this way you could stop them before they eat something that may have been left outside. Another good trick would be teaching them to growl and make a mean face on command. They don’t have to attack, they just have to look like they would.
We don’t know about arson and bed-wetting, so there might still be hope for him.
I trained my dog to eat only on command and to growl instead of bark.
He would eat anything that didn’t move fast if I wasn’t in the room, and he probably growled the whole time the night someone rifled through our cars.
(Eat only on command is the best single point of training for a dog, as it establishes dominance. “Stay” is the second best.)
Wile E, I can’t let this statement go. I’m not accusing you of any of the more extreme continuations that I’ll suggest might happen later on, but the mental shorthand you’re using there makes such possible, and so I’m going to take a minute to try to explain what I understand the reality of the situation to be.
While it’s well-recognized that most serial killers will turn out to have had a history of abuse towards animals, and even non-fatal or even non-injurious abuse towards weaker persons, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s a predictive link between abusing animals, or even non-fatally abusing weaker persons.
I don’t disagree that this kid sounds like he needs some serious help, including probably getting the Hell out of that household. But when you say that he’s “a future serial killer” I get worried. It’s like contrasting the reality of recidivism of sexual offenders with the perception that all sex offenders are hard core, and will never stop. It takes a small segment of a population, in the first case animal abusers and in the second hard core sexual predators, and extrapolates them into being examples of all persons in a second group: animal abusers or sexual offenders.
You haven’t made any call to action, but once people accept that kind of flawed set of definitions, I believe that the call to action will show up sooner or later. In the second case, you’ve got the Sexual Offenders lists, where even the schlub who pisses on the side of a building and gets caught by Cindy Lou Who (who’s no more than two) is being treated, in some ways, the same as Aqualung. In this case I’m afraid it could manifest as a call to put all animal abusers into some kind of custody for life, based on the risk they represent.
Which grossly overstates the way that one can predict future behavior based on childhood or adolescent animal abuse.
My understanding is that animal abuse is a very common behavior for a lot of adolescents in abusive situations themselves. I’d rather not get into what I believe the pathology might be there, but I will say that I believe that the number of people who go on from animal abuse to actually murdering people is less than 5%. IOW, as a predicter of future behavior I do not believe that it’s all that much improved over a lottery. You’d probably be just as well rewarded to lock up everyone who suffers from FAS, or childhood abuse, or any of a number of other common points in the histories of many serial killers.
This isn’t to say that these kids don’t need help. Nor is it an attempt to say that the kids should stay with their mother. It’s certainly not a plea to leave the kids alone so that their mother can straighten them up.
The kids need help. And while I’m not about to predict what they might or might not do five or ten years down the road, taking steps now to treat the issues that the children may be dealing with, including getting them out that household, all seem good ideas. But do it because the kids need help. Do it because of the danger they have already shown themselves to be to people and animals around them. There’s no need to increase the threat level from these kids to get most people to see that they need help.
I don’t mean this as an attack on you, Wile E. I just hate it when people start to fall into mental shortcuts that could be used to justify further abuses of individual rights in pursuit of making society completely safe.
Good on you for the dog-training.
I see you’ve already changed your name. But I liked just a violet! 
Does anyone else find this story somewhat hard to believe? At least the actions of the police and so forth.
:dubious:
Not an attack on you either, your post showed a lot of thought and I actually agree with you but I hate when people take one quick, not-completely serious comment and assume that’s all that’s going on in my head. This is the pit and we tend to exaggerate here. I’ve also had a nice well-aged glass of red.
Actually my thought processes were more like “why has no one in authority actually put some effort into helping these kids in a way that may actually do some good because there is the potential there for these crimes to escalate into something more or at the very least just totally screw up the kid for the rest of his life?” and so forth and so on. I’m angry at the system that won’t help kids like this until they are pretty much beyond help, whether he ends up abusing his own wife and kids someday or does become a serial killer. In my opinion everything these kids are doing is a cry for help but all they get is a slap on the wrists and put back into the same abusive situation. It’s maddening!
I didn’t want to shit on anyone’s goodtimes or anything, so I just followed the thread, reading along with my quiet disbelief. But, now that you’ve mentioned it, I agree. The OP itself seemed a bit . . . far fetched, though I suppose moderately possible. What pushed it over the edge for me was the ex Navy SEAL bit- aren’t all the best stories told by “Ex Navy SEALs”?
Who knows, maybe the OP is telling the God’s honest truth and the internet has just made me a cynical bastard, but I definitely am agreeing with your skepticism, Guin.
Whoops, I got confused. I guess justanoldvet is still justanoldvet. j666 confused me by responding to a post made to oldvet.
Oh well, nothing to do but have more wine.
Alas, no.
If you want some examples of The Blue Wall of Silence, which the complaint procedure justanoldvet mentions seems to fit, let me direct you to this Pit thread of mine from earlier this year.
In a relatively small PD, such as I’d expect from what the OP said his home town’s population is, it’s not impossible for a clique to start running any single department of the city government as a personal club. The small size often means that there’s no place for a whistle-blower to hide, and very few avenues for cleaning things up from the inside.
Similarly, there’s the example of the New Orleans Police Department. Which was rather large for the clique situation I was talking about to happen, but had other factors involved.
Unlikely is not the same as implausible. Note: I’m just speaking to the actions of the PD.
YMMV, of course.
Wile E, no worries. I’m a bit of an old grump, and as such my soap box is never far from me.
Uhh, j666 is not the same person as justanoldvet. You might note that one is a guest and the other is a paid-up member.
What, he’s going to invent the entire story for sympathy or attention? I have to figure that most if not all of the story is true, and that the rest is embellished or glossed over at most–after all, explaining every single detail exactly the way it went down can kill the point by bogging the whole thing down. Maybe justanoldvet wasn’t as straightforward with the cops and the Crazy Woman as he says, or maybe she didn’t assault him quite as forcefully as he says, or maybe she didn’t scream quite as loud as he says, or whatever. Doesn’t mean the story as a whole doesn’t have merit, and shouldn’t be taken as basically correct.
Then again, maybe I’m just too trusting. Who knows? But since it’s the Internet and we’re all (except for justanoldvet) pretty detached from the whole thing, at the very least it doesn’t hurt to give him the benefit of the doubt. His 37-pound salmon thread evokes memories of Master Wang-Ka; he probably embellished some details too, but who cares? They’re memorable stories and the bare-bones facts inside them are just as real whether or not you raise an eyebrow at your computer scren.
Why the hostility? (Oh snap, I just realized your screen name. I swear to Buddha, that wasn’t intentional).
His story very well may be true- that’s a fact I entirely admit. I’m just saying that the story struck me as a bit. . . well, grand. Each individual aspect on its own really isn’t particularly striking, but they come together in a manner that is a bit unbelievable.
That said, I’m still reading the thread, right? It’s interesting and I’m all for a good fish tale, especially on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The factuality of it all really isn’t a matter of importance, I was just popping in to say I got the same vibe that Guin did.
True or untrue, embellished or an honest to God recitation of facts, I’m interested- as are the rest of you. That’s all that really is important, I suppose.
My dog is well trained and wont take anything from anyone without permission. The Wife’s Yorkie is not… he thinks everyone is his best friend.
the lil goof.
While you are certainly welcome to believe or disbelieve what you want, but, for what it may be worth, I am being completely honest.
Why would I lie about this?
~mildly offended~