This one will annoy the bleeding hearts out there no end.

So today New Zealand was aghast at the carnage wrought in a small rural town. Earthquake? No, Tsunami? No, Hurricane? No. In fact it was.. drum roll, an animal killing.

It seems some eccentric fellow had 30 or so unregistered dogs on his property, some of which got out and mauled a neighbor’s dog to death. In a fit of revenge, said neighbor grabbed his gun, entered the neighbor’s property and proceeded to kill all the dogs.

Now clearly the doggie killer is a little loose – sure the police should investigate the state of his mind and whether in fact he had a firearms license. But for the entire country to get caught up in a mass hysteria is just madness. The headlines screamed:

‘Haunting scene of death and destruction’ – SPCA describes dog massacre

I’ve visited concentration camps, I’ve seen images from Haiti post earthquake, from the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge and from other massacres. Only two weeks after well over 100,000 human beings lost their lives in the Haiti quake, we jump up and down aghast at the misery of 30 or so dogs.

I know clinical psychologists tell us that cruelty to animals is a stepping stone to pathological behavior against other people, I know guns are dangerous things and in a country blessed with limited incidents involving firearms we should be extra vigilant about these things – but what gets me is that the entire nation is only focused on these dogs, despite what is happening every day of the week all around the world.

The SPCA proclaimed that:

The scene which confronted our two inspectors will leave a lasting impression on them… When I arrived at the property, I was confronted with a scene not unlike a massacre… I’ve never seen anything as horrible as this in my life, and I cannot begin to imagine the terror these animals were faced with

Do these people watch the news? Read newspapers? Did they ever study history in school? If the killing of 30 dogs is the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen in your life, then you’re a lucky person indeed.

Balance please people.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

3 Comments
  • OK, OK, not good- but I’m glad to see the owner dressed up for the cameras! :p

  • Animals always get a lot of coverage in the media.
    Though as a dog owner I can understand why people do get upset by the mindless ones out there. Cruelty to any living thing should be berated but comparing this to the human tragedy of Haiti is indeed out of perspective.

    I know many people though who think 1 dog = 100 humans.

    Thanks Greg

  • The owner handed the first shooter a loaded gun to start the job off, so how pressured could he be?. Sounds to me he got upset because it wasn’t pretty. But those guys shot the lot in twenty minutes, that’s nearly two dogs a minute. They don’t seem too “Frenzied” to me, as the papers would have it, more clinincal and in control, as you should be when using a gun.. THE spca should be asking this guy why he had so many dogs in poor conditions and asking its staff if phone calls from neighbours were acted on. I know from experience that they are not interested in dogs unless they are obviously skinny. As for the workers needing counselling, spare me. They work for an organisation the kills thousands of dogs annually. Surely they’ve seen a pile of dead dogs before. It’s not unknown for people to ask neighbours to shoot dogs, it happened to me many years ago when a neighbour was too twee to deal with his stock worrying dogs. Fortunately another neighbour did the deed, shot eight dogs when they attacked yarded sheep.

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