Believe me, I find all this stuff very upsetting. But none of it is new, or shocking in a world full of brutality and cruelty bred from ignorance and mindless expression of primal and *natural* instincts.

Just today a reminder of an earlier RSPCA campaign through my door featuring the tiny fluffy kitten 'Frazzle' who a group of kids had attempted to burn to death, presumably for a laugh:

'A nine-week-old kitten [was] set on fire by Bradford teenagers [...]
Dorothy Woolf, general manager at Mount Street, recalls the day more than three years ago when the tiny kitten was rushed to the RSPCA shelter.
"There was a serious braying on the door and there was Frazzle stinking of smoke and still smouldering," she said.
A woman had rescued him from a group of children."'
From Telegraph & Argus archive

In another similar story Olive the kitten was rescued from a group of teenagers trying to drown her in engine oil. Again, presumably for a laugh.

Is every child or teenager like this 'sick' and in need of therapy? I hardly think so. In fact I think that the precident for amusement being found in tormenting and causing pain to small creatures was one set a long time ago, and considering its widespread existance more cultures than I could shake a stick at, it's hardly a new or unusual example of human behaviour, in our history and culture.

I think the reason that there are Glenny Kenns and his kind burgeoning out there, is a cultural sickness, not a personal one. And as much as *I would probably love to kneecap that little fucker myself*, I still know that witch-hunt style hysteria over individual instances of animal abuse by kids like him, are but a drop in the ocean...

Is every British tourist who watches a bull fight when on holiday, sick? Are they in need of therapy when they get an adrenalin thrill out of the kill and see that blood pour out of the beast, does that thrill in any way echo sexual excitation, and if it does does that make them sexual perverts? Or are they merely pray to ignorance, and imitating what they have seen other people do before them?

I'm not arguing that cases like this be ignored! There are real issues around how we battle against the mindless expression of the ugliest impulses in human nature (and especially in the young who far more than ever before have access to all kinds of desensitising and 'stimulating' material on the internet.) I'm just trying to place it in some kind of perspective, and in the context of a much bigger picture.