Pet store massacre

This past weekend, I saw a news story that shocked and horrified me. In Seattle, the metropolitan area soon to be my home, someone decided to burglarize a pet store. There are a lot of reasons I could think of to burglarize a pet store. Cats and dogs sell for quite a lot of money, and if you have the network to move them to a buyer, they could net someone quite a tidy profit. Even some of the pet supplies in a well-stocked store could be sold to buyers, either in person or online, to make easy money.

The burglar(s) did not choose to do this though. Large pets like cats and such were simply released into the store, and many will require medical attention from getting into fights with each other in the ensuing chaos. What the vandals took were the exotic pets like the reptiles, amphibians, and insects. While arguably just as neat as other pets, they are notoriously hard to sell, even in a black market, simply because the demand for snakes and tarantulas is very low compared to most any other type of pet.

The burglars were not content to simply steal the pets from the reptile corner, though. What they did next was far more disturbing than I ever would have imagined. This person, or persons, took all of the mice, rats, hamsters (and other small rodents) to a back room, where they were released, and systematically stomped on. According to the pet store owner, who explained this in tears to the camera crew interviewing her, it appeared as if the burglars had spent quite a lot of time back there, mercilessly killing the animals on the floor.

Two justifications are usually given for animal cruelty laws: that cruelty to a non-human animal harms the animal, and that the cruelty harms the person engaging in the cruelty. My personal preference is to emphasize the former as the main reason for the wrongness of wanton cruelty to our non-human companions. After all, it seems quite analogous to me to think of human on human violence, where we would find it odd if someone were to suggest that what was truly wrong with killing their neighbor was that it would do psychological harm to the killer (dehumanize him). Isn’t the harm about which we should be most concerned the harm to the victim?

Even though I traditionally argue from the standpoint of the harm to the victim, I would like to think now about the harm to the wrong-doer. Even though there is a harm to the victim (a grave harm), the harm to the wrong-doer is not something about which we can summarily forget. The harm is there, and we should be cognizant of it.

How did we, as a society, fail someone to the point where they found no personal revulsion in the idea of wiping out dozens (hundreds?) of living things? It is difficult for me to accept that there are lots of people out there who are simply incapable of possessing empathy (apart from sociopaths, whose disorder is precisely that lack of empathy). Was this burglar who took delight in killing the rodents a sociopath? Can sociopathy even be attributed to those who feel no empathy for things outside their own species? Troubling questions.

Either way, it scares and bothers me to think that there is someone out there who was able to do something like this, and who found the idea inside themselves without turning away from that kind of darkness in horror.