I wasn't sure I agreed, but at least for vet who cares for pets,you need to be sensitive to the way people feel about animals. My friend pays a premium for the services of a very popular and successful local vet. It think that as long as she can afford it, it's worth it, and what makes him a great vet is his people skills. The pet owner is unable to communicate with the animal, and may be facing the crushing responsibility of deciding whether the animal should be put down. A good vet is able to explain the situation with the pet owner honestly and sensitively. If she didn't expect a reaction to posing with a dead cat, I don't think she's really attuned to how some people feel about animals.

My last girlfriend was sort of annoyed at me, because I could watch a horor movie where several people are gutted, but I had to fast forward through the killing of the cat in Apt Pupil. It not that I think cats are more important than people, or that killing a cat is morally worse than killing a person. It's just an emotional response. I cried more when my first cat died than when my grandmother died. There's no right or wrong to it.

People are upset by the killing of a cat, and if she doesn't get that, she may be a good vet, but she should probably be looking after livestock instead of pets.

Hitler had to step out of movies or cover his eyes when animal suffering was depicted.
JHM is Hitler.

Hitler only had one testicle. I have two. And I know just how I could prove it to you.

Dickpics.

Actually, I'm Stalin.

I read it as "vegetarian" the first time.. the Hitler connection continues! Seriously though, what the fuck. At least where I live, housecats go all over the place. Once in a while I'll come across an eviscerated cat because we have coyotes in my neighborhood too. Cats have followed me back home for miles. And I've seen some feral cats and I can tell the difference. It's not the best photo but NOTHING about this cat screams "feral." Like, maybe it's different in Texas and cats don't just go outside like mine do, but the only time I'd even think about any sort of redirection behavior is if I felt like it was me or the cat, in which case I'd probably run away. And I'm not a fucking vet.

She fucked with the cat mafia. That has Consequences.

I miss anybody who posted here with zest. homer included

She definitely took a lot of joy in shooting an arrow into this cat's head. So I'd say that no, she is not a good person.

My wife and daughter work with a cat shelter that employs a trap, neuter, and release program to control the feral cat population. There are a number of vets in my area who neuter feral cats for a reduced fee, which is certainly a more humane alternative to what this nutcase did - and I'm sure she's done it more than once. Killing a cat with a bow & arrow is not something you do on a whim.

So far as I can tell, she mentioned that it was a tomcat. So I'm assuming her position of happiness about it is that she's keeping the stray population down. Although that's a good thing to do, it's not the sort of thing you do with a big grin.

I read that she posted that this was "my first bow and arrow kill". So no she probably hadn't done it before, and yes, she's starting to look pretty creepy.

There are competent pediatricians who sometimes have to tell parents that, despite their best efforts, modern medicine was unable to save their child. Those pediatricians have saved far more children's lives than you or I ever will. But if he had a big smile on his face when he broke the news and snapped a selfie with the grieving parents, he'd still be a sick fuck.

She's happy because she found what she thought was a publicly acceptable excuse to go around her neighborhood killing things with her new archery set. Bitch is a psycho.

Every job interview she has for the rest of her life is going to be a wild ride for all involved.

Trap neuter return (TNR) involves trapping, fixing, vaccinating and returning feral cats to their original location. They will no longer breed and their continued presence will keep feral colonies from growing more so than blanket euthanasia policies of the past. Anyone who is even tangentially involved with pets is aware of this, so one can only assume this person is a sociopath who likes to kill animals.

So because she claims this was her first bow and arrow killing, it invalidates the possibility she's done this before in other ways and is actually a fucking cat-murdering sociopath. Gotcha.

Spikestoyiu has it right.

I suppose it's possible that she's done it before, but actually, my point was that if you think your first bow and arrow cat killing is an occasion for a facebook. post like this, you may be a psychopath.

Psychopaths are supposed to be quite common, and most are not murderers. From my extremely limited understanding of the term, what would make this woman out to be a psychopath isn't so much the act of killing the cat, but the tone-deaf facebook post, which shows a lack of understanding of
human emotion that a psychopath might display.

Stop being so melodramatic, John. It's just a cat.

I suppose you're probably baiting me, Homer, but I don't think I'm being melodramatic at all. Killing feral cats is controversial, but it's not the worst thing ever, and if she killed someone's pet by mistake, well that's a huge fuckup but it's not the worst thing ever. What's super creepy about this woman is how disconnected she seems to be from normal human emotional response. If that hadn't been someone's pet, that Facebook post would still have bitten her on the ass. It would have been a local story instead of a national one.

Why?

Haven't you ever taken a picture of a fish you caught? Of a deer you've hunted? If this were a feral raccoon or a feral lion or even a feral wharf rat - those disgusting little fuckers - nobody would care. Taking pictures of kills is what people do when they hunt animals. It's normal.

She killed someone's pet by mistake, that's a huge fuckup. We can all agree on that. This women is a fuckup, doubly so because she's a veterinarian and vets aren't supposed to murder pets, let alone make the evidence go viral on her own social media feed. But the thing that you're upset about, is she's taking a picture of a hunting trophy?! Come on. Come ooooooon.

It's a cat. It's dead. She took a picture, and now all of a sudden she's a Hitler?

Nobody is saying that this woman is Hitler. He was a vegetarian and a proponent of animal rights. He killed jews, not cats.

Actually, I'm Hitler. No wait, I'm Stalin.

I'm not upset, Homer, I'm just amazed at her self-destructive cluelessness, to the extent that it seems pathological. Feral or no, nobody looks at a picture of someone holding up a dead cat by the arrow in its head, and says "I think I'll take my cat to THIS vet!"

I'm not saying that she's a bad person. I think there's a good chance, an excellent chance, that she's had better moments than this. I think she did a terrible thing, and she deserves to lose her job, and for sure the clinic can't be seen as standing by her in this, but the people who talk about cutting her throat and blinding her aren't impressing me with their deep compassion.

I'm not the one who brought up the term "psychopath", and none of us are qualified to diagnose her. Again, most psychopaths are not criminals. They lack emotions, and they learn to respond appropriately to the people around them. That might explain how someone can go so far off the grid left alone with Facebook.

But that's just speculation. I'm not going to try to back it up with anything.

If you don't take the fact a bow and arrow was used seriously, you're a fucking idiot. It is absolutely psychotic to do that to a cat, regardless of circumstances.

Jesus, Gmork, why isn't Homer telling YOU to calm down?

Listen, most of us in here seem to be mostly sci-fi geeks, computer enthusiasts, and comics nerds, and some of us may not be the seasoned outdoorsmen that you clearly are. (No, Homer, I've never been photographed next to a fish or an animal that I've killed, but members of my family certain have been.)

I may have fired an arrow once or twice in summer camp in the 60s, I really don't remember. My main experience with arrows as a weapon is when used by Indians in old westerns. If there's something I don't understand, explain it to me, okay?

Imagine if this was a heart surgeon who took a selfie with a heart or something in a MKX Cassie Cage parody vine. Doesn't mean he's not doing his job well.. just sayin'

It's not "self destructive cluelessness" to post a picture of your hobby on Facebook. It's bad luck that her hunting trophy happened to be a house cat, not a feral one, and she dun goofed for letting the internet dox her with such a deliciously ironic story, but that's a different matter from the picture taking itself.

And it's pointless telling Gmork to calm down. Gmork never listens to reason. You, on the other hand, actually sometimes do.

IZ - I would totally be cool with a heart surgeon doing that! Just so long as he didn't actually kill the patient, or operated on the wrong patient, and he made sure the proper patient confidentiality/ release forms were filled out, well fuck, it's all good!

(although a heart surgeon should really be doing a Kano fatality.)

Also worth pointing out, sadistic assholes do this all the time and miss, and cats and dogs end up in the vet still alive with arrows stuck through them. A fucking VETERINARIAN who doesn't know better is a menace.

Jesus fuck do I not miss Homer being gone.

if it was Texas the cat would have had a gun too

It's not people calling her mean names. It's people saying that she ought to have her throat cut, and you don't to be planning on actually doing it for that to be FUCKED UP. I had to flag a YT comment earlier where someone offered to pay to have her blinded. Some threats are legal, some aren't. Some targets are good people, some aren't, but it's never a legitimate form of discourse.

I haven't been threatening her, so I'm not going to feel bad. Those who have been threatening her should feel bad, not because they're being mean to a misunderstood animal lover, but because they're poisoning the internet, but I doubt that they will. I don't think as much sympathy as you think she will, and I don't think it's gong to do her that much good.

The career she must have been preparing herself for for years has been destroyed. She's being investigated for a crime. Her life is ruined. What more is needed to satisfy people's sense of outraged justice? They're acting like she getting away with something, but she's not.

God, I fail at proofreading!

The Internet Shame Machine is inherently awful, regardless of whether threats are carried out or not. 21st century mob justice.

There was the case of that tourist who took a selfie at an exploded Manhattan building a few weeks ago where 2 people had died, and she got absolutely fucking pilloried for it, as far as making click-hungry news sites. Bragging about cat killing is on the opposite end of the shame spectrum, but still. I feel like this wasn't a thing until about 10 years ago.

Well, there's an understandable tendency to assume that it's not as terrible as it was. Like I said, when I first heard that a vet had posted a picture of what she thought was a feral cat, i assumed an entirely different context. I don't know how many of you have seen the posts. What she wrote was like a parody of the callous, self absorbed, social media asshole. I couldn't paste It from the phioto, so I'll quote from memory: it was something like: "The only good feral cat is one with an arrow through its head. Vet of the year award accepted LOL", and a couple of stupid emotions thrown in. You just don't imagine a vet doing something like that, and you assume that it was an honest mistake. Until you see what she wrote.

>>d a couple of stupid emotions thrown in that was supposed to be emoticons... or maybe emojis? Is there a difference?

I think emojis are animated and emoticons are static?

Or is it that the emoticons are comprised of ascii characters and the emojis are actual little icons. Seems like it would maybe be the other way around, then.

Good lord, I'm old.

Emoji is just a made-up term for a certain brand of graphical emoticons.

It's like calling all napkins "KFC cleaners" because KFC has the most popular napkins. They're still just napkins. Those are still just emoticons, not emoji.

You're buying into their branding bullshit.

Emoji are specifically extended characters that are generally rendered as graphical images instead of as font glyphs. It's like the Unicode snowman (☃) only moreso (⛄️).

What fluffy said. Emojis are individual characters designed to look like simple images, originally used and popularized in Japan (hence the Japanese-sounding name). To the best of my knowledge, there is no branding implied by the name, and a number of them have become standard Unicode symbols in recent years. Wikipedia's got a good list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Blocks

Depending on what device you're using to view the page, you may see most, none, or all of them. My personal favorites are dog 🐶, bunny-girl 👯, and three-heads-impaled-on-a-pike 🍡

I know Boomer can't see the dog paws emoji, which is sad, because they'd be a great signature for him.

🐾🐾🐾

I still love that there's 💩 and that in many fonts it has the same silhouette as 🍦

I'm not commenting on this video because it makes me sad and I don't come here to feel sad

here have some 🍕

>>Just how indefensible does a young white woman's actions have to be before JHMF doesn't leap to shield her from the horrible internet meanies?

>>Child murder? It has to be child murder...right? Right?!

Honestly, if she were guilty of child murder, my position on the use of threats would be the same. What I said was that threats are never legitimate discourse. That means that a person's age, race, gender, and level of guilt are irrelevant. It's not about protecting her, it's about protecting the internet. It's about protecting all of us from becoming a mob of terrorized terrorists.

If it seems like young white women are usually the targets, that's because young white women are usually the targets. That's not coming from me, it's coming from the sickos who get off on this kind of stuff. If you don't think that's true, you're just not paying attention.

As I've said, I think she may have serious personality disorder issues. She's done a terrible thing. She deserves to lose her job, and to be prosecuted if she broke the law. I think its probably a good thing if she never gets to be a vet again.

Nominal, why isn't that enough? Why is advocating for having her professional life destroyed and maybe getting some jail time so short of the mark that you seem to accusing me of being infatuated with the woman?

Oh, and while we're on the let me address Hooker's horseshit about how I feel that women who are harassed need to be rescued by awesome guys like me.

I would if I could. If ANYone could stop ANYone else from being threatened, harassed, or bullied, they should. But you can rarely stop someone from being threatened, harassed, or bullied. All you can ever do is let the target know he or (more often) she is not alone, and remind the bullies of what they presumably already know, that bullying is wrong. They hate being reminded of that. That's why they cooked up the epithet "white knight" and the weirdly misandrist myth that a man who supports a woman's right to not be bullied MUST be doing it out of some desperate sexual motive. Which is the crazy myth you boys push all the time.

Speaking in opposition to harassment and violent hate speech is the right thing to do. It's usually a woman who is the target, but I've spoke out in support of men before, and if anyone cared enough to make me a target, it's exactly how I'd hope to be supported.

It's easy to dismiss a couple of perverse motherfuckers who attack the motives of the person trying to do the right thing when a bunch of people are doing the wrong thing. For the record, my motives aren't what you think they are, but my motives are secondary to my actions.

Hooker and Nominal, you can go fuck yourselves. Or, maybe you'd prefer to go fuck each other.

>>Oh, and while we're on the let me address Hooker's horseshit about how I feel that women who are harassed need to be rescued by awesome guys like me.

While we're on the SUBJECT! SUBJECT! shit.

My problem is that I don't write in a straight line.

No one's defending death threats. They're hollow rhetorical devices (again, how many people have followed up on them?), counterproductive, and needlessly ugly. My larger point is that there's varying degrees of Internet Stupid, and one does not invalidate the other.

The problem with our online mob mentality--or any mob mentality, for that matter--is that it relies of vascillating between emotional extremes, causing level-headed people to adopt a "well, maybe both sides are wrong" mentality, even when it's not the case.

Compare Trevor Noah's lame and blandly offensive Twitter jokes to a hillbilly openly bragging about how much he hates Muslims. Both are exposed to Internet shame. One was a comedian trying out some new material that flopped, the other a naked bigot proud of his ignorance. The Internet Outrage cycle forces reasonable people to falsely equivocate both cases, even when they're clearly dissimilar.

Let's face it, she's a piece of work, and angry comments are to be expected.

It's the threats, it's stuff like someone talking about how someone ought to cut her throat. That shit is fucked up just because it's fucked up. It doesn't matter if no one's actually going to cut her throat, or even if she's not going to read it. The internet is our culture, and making threats of violence an accepted form of discourse will make our culture fucking horrible, and make more serious forms of threats and real harassment less of a stretch.

So what? You SHOOT adult pheasants.