The Face Of Cruelty
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This is what callousness looks like.
It’s not Hannibal Lecter.
It’s a young woman with a job selling pets at Petland.
It’s the face of a manager-approved rabbit-killing Petland employee.
UPDATE:
Here is some contact information for Petland. Please keep your messages nonviolent:
Ed Kunzelman, Founder and Chair
Frank Difatta, President
Petland USA
250 Riverside St.
Chillicothe, OH 45601
740-775-2464
800-221-5935
740-775-2575 (fax)
frank.difatta@petland.com
By the way, “Petland, Inc. has terminated the Akron store owner’s franchise agreement. Effective immediately, the store is closed and will not reopen.” source: http://www.woio.com/Global/story.asp?S=10848039
That is just sick. I wonder how you can even sleep at night after doing that. It’s just like fun for her…that is just malicious!
I believe that this type of callousness is a natural defense mechanism. There are tons of videos showing vivisection workers callously abusing and tormenting animals for fun. They laugh and joke about their cruel behaviors all the time. I think they laugh and joke as a way to minimize the psychological impact of their own behaviors. If they can make the cruelty they inflict on others seem insignificant by joking and laughing, then it is easier for them to dismiss the consequences of their behaviors as unimportant.
Studies show that normally compassionate people will do incredibly cruel things when told to do so by a perceived authority figure. Killing and allowing animals to suffer for lack of veterinary care are standard practices in the pet trade, so even the manager of this Petland probably had a perceived authority figure (i.e. the company itself) telling her what to do. In order to make the cruel act more acceptable to themselves, she and her employee probably made jokes and laughed about what they were doing. It made it seem less important and therefore less psychologically damaging.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not defending these actions. They are needless and cruel and any person with integrity would quit their minimum wage job rather than torture and kill animals. I’m just offering a potential psychological explanation for the apparent callousness shown in this video.
I sent Petland an email asking them to stop selling live animals.
If they had a company policy that respected animals’ lives, something like this never would have happened.
Petland does have policies on the treatment of animals that is why this store was immediately shut down and that horrible employee was fired