This article has the literary tone and intellectual depth of a meat-eating anti-hunter, possibly the only type of person on the face of the planet more annoying than a hipster.
On 8/17/07, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> <
> http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-cruelty17aug17,1,7620917.story
> >
> http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-cruelty17aug17,1,7620917.story
>
> Drive-by shooters, often youths, are killing farm
> animals in a growing wave of violence. The
> culprits may face only vandalism charges.
> By John M. Glionna
> Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
>
> August 17, 2007
>
> PETALUMA, CALIF. The buzzards led Nick Bursio
> to his prized calf. He found the body just over a
> rise in the field, with a bullet hole in its left shoulder, near the
> heart.
>
> Bursio had heard of animals killed by rustlers
> for their meat. But not until that May morning
> had he ever imagined anything so senseless as
> shooting cattle presumably just to watch them die.
>
> "I had a hollow feeling in my gut, to see that
> dead calf laying there, with the mother cow
> bellowing nearby," said the Sonoma County
> rancher. "I thought, what the hell's going on in this place?"
>
> Authorities are searching for a drive-by shooter
> who guns down cows as they calmly munch grass in
> the rolling pastureland 50 miles north of San
> Francisco. Since February, five cows have been
> found dead in two counties, shot with
> small-caliber bullets designed to inflict prolonged pain and suffering.
>
> 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. In addition to the Northern California
> cattle shootings, 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."
> [....]
>
>
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