WHAT HEELS!: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Unlike cow tipping, which is an urban myth, boozed up or bored rural kids have a sickening new pastime: using livestock grazing peaceably in a field for target practice "just to watch them die," according to the Los Angeles Times:
Nationwide, an increasing number of animal cruelty cases are being reported outside city limits: Horses, cows, goats and other farm animals are being killed, authorities say, often by angry, reckless youths, perhaps acting on dares.
Although there are no statistics on such crimes, newspapers detail scores of cases. Two Texas college students were indicted last fall for slashing a horse's neck before stabbing it in the heart with a broken golf club handle. In Pennsylvania in 2005, three joy-riding men killed a pony named Ted E. Bear that belonged to a 4-year-old boy.
Last year, two Tennessee teens shot and killed 24 cows, many of them pregnant. "They just wanted to see what shooting cattle was like," said Hickman County Sheriff Randal Ward.
California has also seen its share of the rural violence. … Oakland police are investigating the May killing of 15 goats, each shot in the face as they huddled in a portable pen. Officers said residents had called in to report the sound of "babies crying."
Fresno County detectives arrested two groups of teens in 2005 in the shooting of two dozen cows and horses. In 2003, two Sonoma County men used their cars to ram to death a horse named Gentle Song.
A number of studies suggest that kids and teens who maim or kill animals often commit violent crimes as adults. "Driving around in search of animals to kill is very planned and methodical, which could make it more pathological and dangerous. These animals could be standbys for the real thing: a human being," Mary Lou Randour, national director of human-animal relations for the Humane Society, tells the Los Angeles Times.
The paper notes that, "Among those who preyed on animals before turning on people were mass killers Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler."
All but seven states have felony animal cruelty laws on the books, but they rarely apply to food animals. And these crimes usually don’t get same level of media coverage as cases involving pets – Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick’s alleged involvement in running a dog-fighting ring being a notable example.
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