This makes me SO ANGRY

[Alice Kable]

[MENTION=3123]agingermom[/MENTION] we are not politically correct but we are right.

 

[anatess]

@anatess , I have to tell you if I see a snake in my yard I would flipp out !!!!!! What I would NOT DO is to take a golf club just for fun and torture the snake. Dogs are not rare animals that you seldom see. I can understand someone getting scared of a snake, a crocodile ,but to hurt it just for fun is not acceptable.This guy is a piece of

From the news article, I don't see that this guy did it for fun. I think, to him, it is exactly the same thing as whacking a snake out of his yard. It's not the rarity or the popularity of an animal that evokes this kind of reaction. It's the lack of respect. People usually respect something he understands the value of. For example, it is not uncommon to find people who will brush their cats hair for hours and turn around and kick a dog. It is not uncommon to find people who will go to war to save their english bulldog yet would go to war to euthanize their neighbor's pit bull. It is not uncommon to find people who sleeps with their dog in their bed and then go and swerve their car onto incoming traffic to run over the snake on his way to work.

Even Michael Vick claims to love animals while staring down a dog he drowns in his pool. Why is this? It's because Michael Vick grew up around dog fighting. He understands that dogs are for fighting and not much else. He doesn't know any better. He never got himself educated on these animals.

Majority of people will not think twice about taking a shovel to a harmless snake. Why is this? It's because people grow up around a culture who thinks snakes are evil - a snake gave Eve the apple. TV, movies, books, even well-known Harry Potter portray the snake as a symbol of villainy. No amount of Crocodile Hunter or Bindi the Jungle Girl can possibly overturn that cultural saturation and most people do not bother to learn about these magnificent creatures.

So yes, owning pet snakes gave me a whole new perspective about the animals around us - including the dog. If you've gone through the journey of truly going out of your way to learn about animals you normally could care less about (I was one of those who would shoot a tiny snake in my yard on sight), not because you want to rebel against society by piercing your face, shaving your head, covering your skin with tattoos and wrapping an 8-foot python across your shoulders, but to really understand these creatures around us, it will seem like your world has just been opened a lot wider and realize, yea, there are those who hurt innocent animals not because they are inherently cruel but because they just don't see any value in them. And so it becomes our goal, our mission, to teach people about these animals that we love. And in that, Steve Irwin is my hero. My favorite Steve Irwin episode is when he let an 8-inch diameter tarantula crawl over his face and after that he faces the camera with this look of complete wonder and amazement exclaiming, "he's a thing of beauty!". After that show, I've been a lot more friendly to our occassional household spiders...