I was brought up rural and recently squicked-out a SO by revealing that we put our own animals down instead of paying a vet to do the same thing, and, frankly, had a “meh, War is Hell” reaction to the the puppy-tossing Marine video.
But gratuitous cruelty is a red flag, if for no other reason that if the Freudian penis & vagina symbolism is as vivid as in the OP.
Heh. I sucked a gerbil into a vaccuum cleaner once.
It happened when I was a kid. It was my turn to clean the family room. We let our gerbils run on the couch sometimes, they were very friendly, and never jumped off. So while I was picking stuff up getting ready to vaccuum, I let them out to play. So I started vaccuuming, and had to pull the head off the vaccuum and use the long pipe to get into corners. I was standing in the middle of the room looking around for anything I’d missed when I heard a ‘fwoomp’. I immediately stomped on the on switch and looked at the couch. Only one gerbil. One of them had jumped off, and wandered in front of the open pipe. Apparently I yelled or something, cuz my whole family came running. I was pulling the pipes apart trying to find him, and so everyone saw a shaken, confused gerbil tumble out of the second section. The look on his face very effectively communicated ‘WTF?’. The gerbil was fine, I felt really bad, and everyone laughed.
Wanton cruelty bad++
OP’s date: possibly a psycho. I’d ask her to explain and if she gets all defensive about how it was “nothing” then I’d tell her to fuck off and never speak again. There’s other fish in the sea.
Slithy Tove: I’d think it depends on how you put them down. If I had a date or friend or whatever who said he put his animals down by, e.g., shooting them, well I could deal with that. If he said, “Oh, we either put them in a bag and drown them in the tub, or sometimes we step on their heads with a heavy boot” then I’d be horrified and disgusted. Because that is fucked up and unnecessary in 2008.
Me, personally, I would still date her. It’s just a hamster. And besides, I have a thing for crazy girls.
Perhaps the hamster really deserved it?
Seriously, this is stupid. How do we know if this is weird or not? Tell him to stop second guessing and ask her. She’s either joking, making light of an accident, or just plain weird. We can’t tell. People say stupid things all the time, purposefully or not. I’d hate to be judged by a potential partner on a stupid joke that went wrong.
Well yes, we’re making a whole pile of judgements based on second hand telling, but hey this is the SD, that’s how we roll.
If she had told the story of the time she accidentally vacuumed up her childs hamster and the poor thing died, and that it was awful at the time, but now it’s kinda funny, then I’d say she was a normal person.
However, she said she vacuumed up the hamster on purpose, to see what would happen. It died. She thought that was funny. That’s just weird.
99.9999% she’s joking or trying to make a funny story out of an accident.
I’ve heard a million little anecdotes like this in my life and the people telling them are neither “creepy” nor suffer from a “psychopathic lack of empathy.” Some of you people can be really detached from reality sometimes. Log off and get some fresh air.
Well, ok, fair enough.
I wonder what did happen? Whatever it was is probably an anti-climax after all this, unless there was gunpowder involved or something. 
DITTO!!!
Accidental deaths of a child’s pet hamster, goldfish, bird, etc. may actually be amusing when looking back in retrospect at the circumstances.
But it’s be a red flag for me if someone offhand mentioned “I took my son’s goldfish out of it’s bowl and let it flop around on the floor to see what would happen” or “I was curious to see how long my daughter’s canary would last in the microwave”. Serious headcases.
She killed her child’s pet for kicks. Run like hell.
Well, it’s not the usual stuff we see on Mythbusters, admittedly…
I still think he needs to ask her and get the context before giving up on her though. They might have been jokingly discussing what they would do as an International Super Villain (complete with funky cape) just beforehand for all we know.
Run away, don’t look back.
Well…she would have lost me at “child”, but yeah, I would be really turned off. Her story has all the makings of someone slightly out of touch with reality. Not psychotic per say, but certainly a little off.
By any chance did you grow up on a beet farm?
He should definitely push the schedule back to the point of pondering the prospect of perhaps developing a plan so maybe they might one day get the chance to set up a possible meeting.
But seriously, it’s been weeks already, if they’re going to meet, they should do it, so that future stories could be told with the context of tone of voice and body language. Maybe then he wouldn’t freak out about a cute little hamster being sucked up a vacuum on purpose. Heck, the story doesn’t even say how old she was, maybe she was 12 and genuinely curious, or trying to show off for a friend… who knows, maybe it was yesterday and she’s a sociopath. Unless he’s really scared of this woman, he should look past it unless something serious comes up in the future.
Go ahead and flame me, but if the genders were reversed, I’d probably have a different reaction. But we generally don’t see little girls torturing animals and then growing up to be serial killers.
Well the OP did say that she sucked “her child’s” hamster up in the vacuum. Theoretically it’s possible that she had a child old enough to have a pet hamster at 12, but that brings up a whole new interesting set of issues.
I vote with the “run away” crowd, unless this woman has shown a demonstrable pattern of having a sick sense of humor (plenty of my friends have very dark/sick senses of humor but wouldn’t harm a fly, so it’s possible–sounds kind of doubtful in this case, though).
There was a recent documentary, aired on PBS, showing prairie dogs being vacuumed up by a large, truck mounted vac. The animals were apparently unharmed and they were subsequently relocated, but you’d have to be pretty dumb to think you could do this w/ a pet hamster and a domestic vac, w/o harming the animal.
I think I’d vote for splitsville on someone who admitted doing that, unless they acknowledged their poor judgement and expressed some genuine remorse.
From what I can gather from my friend, the woman (who is in her 40’s, ex-military, served in the first Gulf War), told him the story about the hamster as a joke. She supposedly did it when she was in her 20’s and said she used to tell it to her kids as a humorous cautionary tale of what she was “capable of.” She did say she did it out of curiosity, to see what would happen, and it suffocated. Now her daughter (who is an adult) teases her about it.
Then he called her on it, wanting to know if it was a true story, and she said something like, “Truthfully, I don’t even remember if it really happened or if it was just something I thought about doing, and then created a story to shock people.”
When he insisted that she tell him if she really did it, because it freaked him out and he didn’t know if he wanted to talk to her anymore, she got angry and defensive and said, “If you don’t know me well enough by now or trust me not to do something like that, then no, we shouldn’t talk anymore.” Then she regaled him with some tales of horror of things she’d see in her career (Army nurse), to prove that she was a person of compassion and deep feeling.
Now he doesn’t know WHAT to think, and neither do I. I never had to deal with stuff like this when I was internet dating…
Seems to me, in light of new information, that your friend should take the “plenty of fish in the sea” approach and seek elsewhere. If she’s showing this many negatives this early in the relationship, that would be a huge red flag to me.
Edit for caveat: I’ve been happily married for almost 20 years and have never internet dated, so I have no idea how these things are supposed to work. Still doesn’t seem like a good situation to me, though.
Okay, as one of the above-mentioned rural people who has butchered pretty much any kind of livestock you can think of (my husband did draw the line when I labeled the ziplock baggies full of chicken parts according to the name of the bird inside) I would still be horrified, because I wouldn’t think to kill/maim/torture an animal just to see what would happen! :eek: That is a serious type of weird. And telling caring Army nurse stories doesn’t cover it up – how many “angels of death” have we heard about that have been the nicest nurses…until they decide to off a few gomers!!!
As a service to humanity, I would break off all communication with her, but not tip her off as to what set off the red flags.
If she continues to think that’s acceptable date chatter, it could save people a certain amount of anxiety in the future.