While I do not value the life of an animal equal to or above that of a human being's life, I still am strongly against being cruel to animals. There are many fairly common cases of animal abuse that I am sure we have all heard about. Situations where the animal was not feed adequately, was not taken care of properly, and was beaten out of anger or for "disciplinary methods."
In an article that I came across earlier this week, reported by CNN, I read about how 20 year old Kevin Dean Parrish allegedly "put his grandmother's dog into a heated oven after it nipped at him." He reported to the police that he had a past of having "anger issues" and he was actually planning on leaving the 9 pound Chihuahua-Pincher in the oven, until his brother walked into the room. Although the dog is recovering fine from the burns it acquired, this is still a very cruel thing to do to an animal and I also find it very strange as well. In thinking about how odd it was I was reminded of a situation I had been in that was also very strange.
When I was younger our family had a gorgeous Sheltie puppy. For any of you that do not know what a Sheltie looks like, it is characterized by its beautiful long, thick coat of fur. At the same time we owned this animal we also had a lady living next to us named Wanda Russell. This woman had a weird obsession with our Sheltie dog. We would often find our dog missing and later discover that she had taken it to her property while we were unaware. This went on for awhile, but we never really thought anything of it, because she never tried to keep our dog or injure it. However, one day in the middle of winter our dog was again missing. When it returned back home later we, to much surprise and shock, discovered that this woman had completely shaved all of our Sheltie's fur off. This was very cruel of her to do considering it was winter and our Sheltie was mainly an outside dog. This lady was not intentionally trying to be cruel to our animal like the guy in the article was, but it was very strange that she decided to shave our dog. These two situations are not entirely the same, but equally bizarre.
