Well, are you saying you are 100% sure that it’s a real, live puppy being displayed at the beginning of the video? Or are you saying that you are 100% sure that the video shows what it appears to show – a soldier throwing a real, live puppy dog?
Occam again, eh? 
Throwing a puppy off a cliff isn’t very funny, nor is pretending to, but the sudden outrage because of a dog, on the part of privileged Americans, over what is or might be going on in Iraq, Americans who’ve slept soundly every night (or at least most nights) for years since this travesty began…well, that’s wry, at least. I can’t help but think some Marine/s might have been struck with the same idea, and I would find it hard to condemn him/them.
This thread will soon enjoy double the number of posts of any SDMB thread with the words “Abu Ghraib” in the title. Much of the rhetoric in the last few pages has been about the morality of the pratfall (Let me answer this one for you: the pratfall is funny, the broken coccyx is not, the word “coccyx” is, the flowers sent to the stricken are not, the ensuing sneezing fit resulting in the fall out of bed is, the resulting broken arm is not, and the rest is up to you), and is almost as irrelevant as the other part. That part has been about whether or not the puppy was authentic, but that just points out the obvious: that the word “puppy,” on the internet, is enough to provoke a reaction that the word “person” (or one of it’s lesser-known synonyms, like “soldier” or “Iraqi”) doesn’t. I don’t find that funny, but I can’t begrudge someone else, maybe someone who’s been there, a bitter laugh at our expense.
I’ve watched the video several times. It sure looks like a stuffed dog doll to me.
I’ve watched it now, with slow dial-up, which gives ample opportunity for play-by-play, and I think it’s real, for the same reasons lissener says. Plus, early on in the video, you can hear the puppy making little noises as it’s being held by the scruff. I doubt that detail would be thought of in a fake.
This is immensely sad.
The “two” dogs have exactly the same size and proportions, same colour and spot patterns.
For me the interesing thing here is to see how the ability to evaluate evidence splits along certain, predictable I´d say, people. A nice study on objectivism.
You don’t get a chance to look at the dog closely after he throws it, but I agree that the second time you see it, it appears to be colored the same.
I don’t see how you can really assess somebody’s ability to evaluate evidence without knowing for sure whether the video is fake or not. I mean, nobody has said anything really off the wall in assessing the reality or fakeness of the video.
And if somebody claims to be 100% sure, that calls their own judgment into question.
So do you feel that if the marine was filmed throwing some random Iraqi child off a cliff, there’d only be an equal level of outrage?
applauds
Well said.
Not necessarily, it could have been an inside joke between black-humored soldiers and say, the rest of their unit, that have been exposed to many episodes of brutal death. Episoding the supposed death of a “cute puppy” in jest may very well have comprised black battlefield-humor.
How about:
Colored the same… and shaped the same… and gee, it also reacts to being jerked around like a real dog.
You give more credibility to the theory that that the guy switched the dog from the living one to an exact replica than the possibility that it`s the same dog. And the reason for that is what, precisely? The evidence shows the same dog but you assume something else.
You’re the one making assumptions. Just because a video exists that portrays a despicable event doesn’t make the circumstance of the video true.
People are right to be skeptical. It’s yet another video from YouTube amongst a horde of others.
The problem is that we are looking at evidence that somebody has chosen to present. The story that is presented appears calculated to shock and outrage.
When that happens, I am always suspicious that there is other evidence that tells a different story.
Check out this web site
Do you believe what the evidence tells you? Or are you skeptical?
And by the way, I’m absolutely not saying that I’m confident the video is a fake. It’s just my best guess.
Remember the bonsai kittens a few years ago?
I can’t tell either way in this. Looking for the dog to blink or move to establish if he’s alive at the beginning. Can’t tell.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s real. The yelps don’t seem to decrease in volume as it falls, nor have I been able to see the dog move at all.
There’s a difference between skeptical and failure to grasp logic.
This isn’t fake moon-landing conspiricy theory nuts, and I don’t want to present this very odd rejection of clear evidence as such, but it is kind of going down the same road.
There are two scenarios. Scenario 1 is a dickhead threw a puppy off a cliff in Iraq.
Scenario 2 is that the soldier found an expensive lifelike stuffed dog in Bagdad. Then convinced a Buddy that it would be a fun joke to throw the expensive stuff dog off a cliff while the buddy faked dog sounds. Or maybe it involved procuring a real dog, and a similiar looking stuffed dog, doing a half-second off-camera switch, and laughs are had by all. Then, once it hit the news 7 months later, and the fun-loving jokester’s family started receiving death threats, he thought it would be even funnier to get his family in on the joke, and keep quiet about his joke, instead of just saying “hey guys, it was a stuffed dog, quit telling my family you’re going to kill them”.
Then when the military investigation started, he’d still keep quiet, taking the joke to a whole new level. What a prankster!
Either I am a complete and total idiot (I don’t have a 160 iq, so it’s possible), or very soon this will story will certainly be confirmed as true, and I will bet that not a single person who vehemently claimed that this video was “obviously fake” will bother to take a few seconds and take a look at their thought process.
Oh, I’m not willing to say I’m 100% certain the video is real. I’m somewhere between 99 to 99.5 percent certain. The alternative is so convoluted and unlikely that I will be shocked if this turns out to be fake.
Yes, I´m skeptical; thanks for asking.
And yes, I know the bonsai kitten is a hoax, I would be inclined to believe such thing if the evidence showed what the narrative describes, cateters, square skulls and all that jazz; what the website presents however, is hot air not satisfactorily substantiated by evidence.
In any case, in one hand we have a rather mundane display of animal cruelty, on the other an extraordinary claim. Of course the standards of evidence would be different for both; and as standards go, we have a video of the puppy being thrown, for the bonsai kittens we have a few small, partial pictures. The weight of evidence is very different for both cases.
Contrapuntal, I am so done with you. You’re simply not worth my time anymore.
For the second time, and as a public service announcement, the audio track is out of sync. Look at the guy who says “so cute”, look at his lips, they don´t follow the words.
I don´t know what`s the issue with streaming videos, but for example in YouTube I´ve always had a problem with the audio ending up out of sync.