Deliberate cruelty

Yesterday a report came in on the scanner that someone in a car was seen throwing a kitten out the window while they were speeding down the highway. The car got off at the convenience store, and the local police looked for it but didn't find it, and turned the license plate over to the state patrol.

And this morning when I was driving home, I noticed a a dead turtle in the gravel right of way on the frontage road by our house. The turtle wasn't there when I left the house an hour earlier. I could see from the tire tracks in the gravel that the driver of the car had deliberately swerved off the road to smash it. I stopped to look, and it was a large female full of eggs. So not only did this horrible person go out of his or her way to kill the turtle, he or she wiped out another generation of turtles in doing so.

I get it that people run over animals. I have run over a squirrel in the road, and on our driveway a chipmunk, frogs, and in fact, I ran over a turtle once myself that I did not see because it looked too much like other rocks on the road. They were accidents, and I felt terrible when I saw what had happened.

But to do it deliberately? We are so cruel to each other--killing, maiming, and destroying--that I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that it trickles down to all creatures great and small. But at the moment I am having trouble figuring out what to do with all of this anger.