I drowned some ants when I was a little kid in our backyard because I was scared of them and also curious. My neighbor told me to think about what I did. I was mortified. I’m a vegan now.
Kids need to learn that kind of empathy. Although I don’t think I would have ever thought about about ripping limbs from frogs.
They also crawled all over and bit me when I was a child, so I had very little qualms with shoving a stick in their pile and pouring glue down it when I was like… 10
I was horrible to animals as a kid. I teased the neighbourhood cats so much. I once put salt on a snail just for fun, without knowing it would die a gruesome death with just one grain of coarse salt. I’m vegan today…
I wasn’t very nice to plants as a kid. I would often pluck wood sorrel off the ground and eat it right there. I once burned a hole in a leaf using my glasses. I’m a meat eater today.
I used to burn ants with magnifying glass with my friend. We also melted the limbs of those tiny green plastic soldiers and made 10-limbed monstrosities. Good times.
When I was six, I was fishing with my father and uncle in a boat. We got a fish, and my uncle swiftly killed the fish immediately. I asked why he did it, it would’ve died anyway.
He said something along the lines of “All life should be respected enough not to let it suffer” and nothing else. A useful lesson that changed my view on suffering of animals. The man was later listed as one of the 10 most sought after criminals in my country, but I take the good and leave the bad.
Nah, white collar crime. I think he ended up on the list mostly because it’s relatively unusual for people to both be convicted and manage to avoid getting caught.
I’ll add mine to the pile. When I was a lad, probably 10 or so, my family’s back porch would frequently get overrun by slugs. I eventually got sick of accidentally stepping on them, so I got the salt shaker and a bunch of paper towels. To my memory I poured salt on a good 30 of them, though it was probably only 10 or so. Salted them, put the paper over them, then the next day came out to collect the bodies and throw them away.
28 year old me would beat 10 year old me’s ass for that. Gotta hand it to him, though—those slugs never did come back to the porch.
I get the poor animals part, but this just seems like avarage shit you have to do in the countryside. Any good country folk know that (some) animals are your enemy, if there are wasps near your house? You kill them, their nest, wait for the extended family to search for their homes and kill them too. Now it’s a much safer enviroment. Same with all rodents, same with all insects, same with slugs… I guess, I never heard of a slug problem.
I used to have a can full of salty water and a little piece of wood with a big nail extending out one end (looked like a prison shiv). I’d impale the slugs and put them in the can. Leave the can overnight, dump em by the field in the morning, rinse and repeat whenever needed.
Very bad. In antiquity, if an army felt personally slighted by a populace, instead of just burning their crops, they would burn and salt the fields. That would prevent the earth from being arable for generations. The salt prevents plant roots from drawing up water, so until the salt is washed away with enough rain (talking tens to hundreds of years depending on how much salt), nothing will grow.
Gotta get used to it. It’s free and more ecological - no chemicals at all. Also great grandpa-grandson bonding time. Slugs first, homegrown cucumber with salt later 👌
Alternate universe where Jeffrey Dahmer is instilled with a sense of justice at an early age, and later goes on to hunt down and lobotomize serial killers.
Wait is that just Dexter? I’ve never seen the show.
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