Sublette County Sheriff K.C. Lehr has received more than 7,000 emails about a Wyoming man who reportedly captured and tormented a wolf before killing it, he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
Some of those are threats.
Lehr said people in his office, as well as Sublette County and Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel, have been receiving threats — including death threats — stemming from Daniel, Wyoming, man Cody Roberts’ reported capture, torment and killing of a wild wolf in late February.
And you wouldn’t classify a kid shooting a squirrel for fun as psychopathy? It doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything but I’d definitely see it as a warning sign. Killing anything just for fun the fun of it seems weird to me.
It’d be pretty hard to kill a squirrel with most bb guns, I would think, it’d just be really harmful and kind of a stupid thing that I can imagine a kid not thinking through, or thinking is funny after seeing their friends get shot with them and coming out okay.
None of that really parallels with the current instance, but the broader point I’m making, I think, is that people throw around words like “psychopathy”, but then that’s never used as a way to discuss anything further. It’s used as a way to shut down discussion and pretend that these things are inevitable instead of being things that kind of stem from a collective cultural cruelty. You see accusations of psychopathy in this thread side by side with people wishing the cruelest possible things on this guy. If it is psychopathy, then this dude is more like a victim of incredible mental illness, and calling for his torture is, a very weird approach to mental illness. Then you also get people who are like “it isn’t an excuse”, and then I think you can dismiss those people out of hand because they’re coming into the discussion thinking that you’re trying to use mental illnesses as an excuse for torturing animals, which is really dumb.
I’d also make the side point that if you were to classify that behavior as psychopathic, than as evidenced by both the thread and just kind of my general admittedly anecdotal experience, then psychopathy would probably be the default state of humanity, which I don’t think really lends meaning to psychopathy as a term.
No, I wouldn’t, for the same reason you instantly stated after your question.
Warning signs are warning signs. They are not indicative of anything other than a possibility.
Probably not. Teenagers are still developing their brains, empathy, etc.
Some teenagers are taught that hunting is a valuable skill and want to practice it. Some just want to use their toy and don’t actually consider the full implications. Some might have been taught that squirrels are vermin.
All those things are more likely than the teen shooting the squirrel because they enjoy causing pain. Probably the squirrels POV never even shadowed their thoughts.
tl;dr teenagers are stupid and do stupid shit without thinking about what they’re doing.