Suzanne à Grenoble

There have been two news headlines in the past week involving teenagers doing horrible things to animals for apparent fun. The more recent incident involved two Missouri boys (one teenager and a 21-year-old) feeding vodka to a puppy at a party and nearly killing it. Poor little Daisy!

The other animal cruelty story, from April 28: two girls videotaped themselves kicking a cat wrapped in plastic around a room while yelling at it! What? When did it become acceptable--fashionable, even--to abuse animals?

These kids are giving the Midwest a bad name.

To further upset you, a friend told me a story last week from the road (I think this happened somewhere in Colorado or Utah): he witnessed a man in a motel parking lot beating up a puppy in the back of a pickup truck. At one point, my source said, the man threw the puppy onto the ground. When he and another bystander confronted the man, he said something like, "oh, this puppy deserves what she's getting. She just needs to learn." Then they called the animal police, who were unable to locate any signs of abuse, so the man got to keep his puppy--or should I say, punching bag?

What's going on here? Does it seem like people are getting a lot angrier and finding the most horrible ways to express that anger?