Marc Estrin : The Execution of an Elephant

Topsy the elephant:
Executed by Thomas Alva Edison

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2010

[Noted author and activist Marc Estrin will be contributing to The Rag Blog on a regular basis.]

Wait! Do not activate that video -- unless you have a stomach immune to moral indigestion. Let me tell you the story first, and then you decide if you want to click the mouse that clicks the video that clicks off the elephant.

This week marked the anniversary of the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant at Coney Island on January 4, 1903. Not the accidental electrocution, but the intentional one, by one of our American heros, Thomas Alva Edison. And for purposes no higher than winning a commercial battle with his nemesis, George Westinghouse.

I reported this incident in a chapter of my novel The Lamentations of Julius Marantz. Julius, our sweetheart, has taken the D train from Manhattan out to his homeland, Coney Island, to submit to a well-earned and inevitable suicide. But since it is a long ride, I thought my readers would like something to entertain themselves along the way. So I included a chapter called "A Study of History," which treats five FUQs -- Frequently Unasked Questions -- concerning the playland and its visitors. Here are the last two:

4. And What about Edison? Did he come too?

At last, a native American. Yes, yes he came, eight years before Freud he came -- accompanied by Westinghouse and Faraday, and Adam Smith, and Death. They came to electrocute an elephant. Forty-four years before Julius was born, they came to electrocute an elephant named Topsy.

Elephants -- the highest form of animal, symbols of strength and astuteness, emblems of wisdom, of eternity, of moderation and pity, removers of obstacles, charismatic beasts suggesting the power of Buddha: miraculous aspiration, analysis, intention, and effort. Their trunks are capable of both uprooting trees and picking the smallest of leaves, thus suggesting that humans develop their powers in both the gross and spiritual worlds.

Massive and gray, they resemble dark clouds of refreshing rain. Indra's mighty elephant digs with its tusks, and reaches its trunk deep into the earth, sucking up water, and spraying it into clouds which bring forth rain. Elephants thus link the heaven above with the chthonic below, and symbolize the mist that separates formed worlds from the unformed.

Their tusks, both digging tools and weapons, linking the beast again to things supra- and sub-terranean. Elephants were named for their tusks, from elefas, the Greek for ivory. Achilles sword, in Pope's Homer, had a handle "with steel and polished elephant adorned."

They are loyal and affectionate, the elephants. Older calves help younger siblings, adults their sick or wounded comrades. They demonstrate ideals. It is said that mothers of great masters will dream of them at birth.

Most easily trained of all the beasts, they rarely forget. And when their great patience is exhausted, they have a remarkable memory for wrongs done them, and many stories are told of elephant revenge.

Mice do not scare them.

Topsy the elephant.
Topsy was 30, and weighed three tons. She began as a worker, hauling the beams and blocks that became the Island. When the parks were built, she turned entertainer, doing tricks, in pink tutu, for gawking faces. Towards the end, she became quite blind, having worn her eyes out looking at America -- and seeing nothing.

But she did see the drunken trainer who put his cigarette out against her tongue and laughed. She picked him up, threw him against the wall, then smashed his head quite easily underfoot. And thus she became "a rogue," a "man-killer," and her sentence was death.

Topsy was given a bale of carrots laced with cyanide, and scarfed them down without effect. Another helping, please? The park owners saw a chance to be tough on crime, and also make a profit. For every scratch, an itch: they announced that the murderous rogue elephant would be publicly hanged. "No, no!" cried the ASPCA. Too cruel and inhuman.

"No, no!" cried Thomas Alva Edison. Hadn't New York State just replaced the gallows with a new, humane, electric chair? "I'll come and help."

There was more to this than met the eye.

In Topsy-time the Wizard of Menlo Park was engaged in his own death-struggle with George Westinghouse for control of America's electrical infrastructure. His DC system, he claimed, was safe, while Westinghouse's was deadly. To prove it, he'd been publicly electrocuting cats and dogs for years. It was he who had convinced the state to use Westinghouse's AC for their electric chair. So much, and no more, had he accomplished: an electrocuted criminal was widely referred to as "being Westinghoused."

So what an irresistible photo-op here! How better to demonstrate the danger of his enemy's system, than to roast a full-grown elephant? Dr. Edison brought a team of technicians, and a film crew. On July 4th, 1903, before a cheering, patriotic crowd of thousands, Topsy was led to a special platform, the cameras rolled, and the switch to Coney's powerful electrical plant was thrown. Topsy's short-lived hell-on-earth lasted only 10 seconds. At six thousand volts. She convulsed, her hide began to smoke, and she collapsed. Applause. "It's a take." The great man showed the film to audiences across the nation to win his point, if not his contracts, and to help forge the created non-conscience of his race.

Whither reeleth our sweetheart?
He sang to himself, in cadence count
E non voglio più servir,
No, no, no, no, no,
E non voglio più servir, hitting on vir a low Eb -- abysmal depth, and the base tone of creation.
Non serviam.

George Orwell had warned him some time ago: "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of civilized men."

Whither hobbles he, wandering among these ghosts?

To the towering parachute jump which -- six years before he was born -- was transferred from the "Lifesavers' Exhibit" at the New York World's Fair, the site right next to the Centaurs. He liked the parachute jump. It reminded him of his father. "It packs more thrills than any wings-in-sky interlude since Icarus," the old guides used to say. It reminded him that it takes longer to rise than to fall. Its rising and falling came to an end in '68, on a nearly vacant lot, in a moribund park on Coney Island. And now, there, in front of him, it rusted.

For Hegel, the Enlightenment meant a struggle between reason and what he called "the night of the world," that chaotic mix of hatred and irrationality which can destroy humanity and what it builds, but which is paradoxically the source of its enormous energy.

For Hegel, human history revolves around the attempt to negate the negativity of "the night of the world," and turn it to productive thought and action. He would have liked to have said, "Where there is id there shall be ego."

Final question: Which tense do you want to live in?

"I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle," our sweetheart said, "in the 'what ought to be.'"

They hanged "Murderous Mary."
The execution of Mary

While googling for a photo of Topsy I came across an even more disturbing graphic of another elephant execution -- that of "Murderous Mary" 11 years later, for similar motives of profit. Mary, killed her keeper in a mood known only to an elephant, but apparently quickly passing. The crowd began chanting "Kill the elephant!" and a local blacksmith pumped two dozen rounds into her with little effect. Fear spread (or was spread), as it easily does, into the business community, and nearby towns threatened to ban the show if Mary was in it.

I'm sure Mary's owner was conflicted over his decision, but it's likely that the loss of his investment in Mary would be less than a potentially ruinous blacklisting, and he decided, like Edison, to kill Mary in public. Not soft on elephant-terrorists he.

Mary was sent by rail to Erwin, Tennessee, where 2,500 people paid to see her hanged like the murderer she was. Wikipedia's taciturn obit goes like this: "The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks."

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. Insect Dreams was recently published in German by Parthas Verlag, Berlin. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. Two novels, The Annotated Nose, and Skulk appeared in November 2008, and The Good Doctor Guillotin in September 2009. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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BOOKS / 'Eating Animals' : The Beef with Factory Farms

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
A sweeping indictment of factory farms

...what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers.

By Jessica Roy / November 8, 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, Eating Animals, is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market.

A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Eating Animals may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; Eating Animals begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about Eating Animals in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.


This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world.

And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have.

And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something.

That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others?

So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned.

These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter.

The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily.

So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it."

For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.

Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap.

But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying.

And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment.

This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

Source / Salon

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Israeli Assault on Gaza: Not Even the Zoo Animals Were Spared

Frankly, it is no stretch to claim that this incident is a metaphor for the Israeli assault on Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces exhibited the same callous disregard for human life during the entire period of the conflict. The government of Israel and the people who sat quietly by as this crime occurred should be deeply ashamed. I can only hope that justice is served by the International Criminal Court.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Visitors look at 30-month-old lioness Sabrina at the Gaza Zoo July 8 ,2007 in Gaza Strip, Gaza. Photo: Getty Images.
At the Zoo: A Nation of Animal Lovers Closes Its Eyes to the Massacre at the Gaza Zoo
By Missy Comley Beattie / February 6, 2009

For days, the mainstream media talked endlessly about it. Michael Vick. Dogfighting. Blood sport. Killing animals that underperformed. Many defended the professional athlete. Others thought Vick should receive the maximum sentence after his conviction.

Some of us shook our heads, repulsed by the cruelty, but we were utterly dismayed that so many people who expressed outrage over Vick’s crime, seemed to pay little or no attention to the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, we’re a nation of animal lovers. And, we’re enamored of our sports heroes. Certainly, the Michael Vick/dog abuse narrative was a juicy plate of filet mignon for infotainment peddlers to place upon our television trays. These are the same “reporters” who seldom mention US troop deaths and who never talk about the estimated million plus Iraqi civilians who have died since the occupation of Iraq.

So, why, then, given our attraction to animal stories, were news anchors silent on the massacre at the Gaza Zoo by Israeli troops who shot and killed caged animals during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza?

The answer, of course, is that we’re supposed to believe that Israeli troops are the good guys. Palestinians are “militants.” Israeli soldiers are, well, soldiers.

An article at www.palestinechronicle.com by Ashraf Helmi and Megan Hirons provides the chilling details. Here is an excerpt from their piece and their interview with zookeeper Emad Jameel Qasim:

The zoo opened in late 2005, with money from local and international NGOs. There were 40 types of animals, a children's library, a playground and cultural centre housed at the facility.

Inside the main building, soldiers defaced the walls, ripped out one of the toilets and removed all of the hard drives from the office computers. We asked him why they targeted the zoo. He laughs. ‘I don't know. You have to go and ask the Israelis. This is a place where people come to relax and enjoy themselves. It's not a place of politics.’

Israel has accused Hamas of firing rockets from civilian areas. Qasim reacts angrily when we raise the subject.

‘Let me answer that with a question. We are under attack. There was not a single person in this zoo. Just the animals. We all fled before they came. What purpose does it serve to walk around shooting animals and destroying the place?’

Inside one cage lie three dead monkeys and another two in the cage beside them. Two more escaped and have yet to return. He points to a clay pot. ‘They tried to hide,’ he says of a mother and baby half-tucked inside.

Qasim says that his main two priorities at the moment are rebuilding the zoo and taking the Israeli army to court.

The gruesome attack must have posed a true dilemma when our mainstream media got wind of it: A tragic tale of dead animals vs. exposing the brutality of Israeli troops. Wolf, Anderson, Campbell, Suzanne, Chris, Norah, Contessa, Rachel, Joe, David, Sean, Bill, Megan, and Shephard are probably working on a way to spin this to suit AIPAC. Perhaps, something like convincing us that a Gaza Zoo animal might be used as a shield by Hamas “terrorists.”

[Missy Beattie lives in New York City. She's written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. An outspoken critic of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, she's a member of Gold Star Families for Peace. She completed a novel last year, but since the death of her nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, in Iraq on August 6,'05, she has been writing political articles. She can be reached at: Missybeat@aol.com.]

Source / CounterPunch

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San Marcos : Officer Receives Threats After Allowing Dog to Die

Missy died en route to a veterinary clinic while San Marcos cop wrote a ticket. Family photo.
Texas cop who wrote a ticket while dog choked to death, received oral reprimand.
August 21, 2008

SAN MARCOS, Texas — A police officer who delayed a couple racing their dying dog to an emergency vet clinic while he wrote them a ticket has received death threats, the mayor said Thursday.

A statement issued by San Marcos Mayor Susan Narvaiz said Officer Paul Stephens was inappropriate and insensitive and that he has been disciplined, but the threats against the officer are "extremely unfortunate."

Narvaiz' statement did not elaborate on the threats. She did release some new details of the incident, including that a second officer had tried to help the choking dog, a teacup poodle named Missy.

"Without question, the situation was not handled very well by Officer Stephens. But the characterization of the story has led to death threats against the officer and his family," Narvaiz said.

Michael Gonzalez and Krystal Hernandez were allegedly driving 95 mph when Stephens pulled them over after midnight Aug. 5 on Interstate 35.

According to Narvaiz, Gonzalez first pulled over on an overpass. Using his patrol car public address system, Stephens asked him to go somewhere safer and Gonzalez drove another two miles at a "high rate of speed," despite the officer's lights and siren.

When he finally pulled over, Gonzalez pleaded with Stephens to let them get to the clinic.

The patrol car's dashboard camera showed Stephens telling Gonzalez: "It's just a dog. You can buy another one. Relax."

Officer Joyce Bender arrived and approached Hernandez on the passenger side of the car. When told Missy was choking, she took the dog and tried to clear its airway to allow it to breath, but failed, Narvaiz said.

At that point, the officers believed the dog was already dead and Stephens issued the ticket. The incident lasted 17 minutes, Narvaiz said.

Gonzalez and Hernandez filed a complaint the next day and San Marcos Police Chief Howard Williams issued Stephens a reprimand. Williams also wrote a letter of apology to Gonzalez.

Narvaiz said Stephens is an Iraq war vet who joined the department in March 2007 and has no history of previous complaints. She said the discipline for Stephens was appropriate.

Gonzalez said Tuesday he thought an oral reprimand was not sufficient.

"That's not really a punishment at all," he said. "I don't feel a person like that should be working in law enforcement."

Source / AP / Houston Chronicle

Please see our original story: San Marcos : Dog Dies After Traffic Cop Ignores Owners' Pleas / The Rag Blog / August 19, 2008.

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San Marcos : Dog Dies After Traffic Cop Ignores Owners' Pleas

The law in San Marcos: Hays County Courthouse. Looks mighty pretty. Postcard courtesy of Phyllis C. Rummel.

"Who's dying? Relax," Stephens said as his cruiser's dashboard camera captured the interaction.

"My dog," Gonzalez said during the Aug. 5 traffic stop.

Source / ABC News. [See video below.]

Cop: 'It's a dog, it's OK. You can get another one.'
August 17, 2008

SAN MARCOS, Texas -- A police officer was accused of inappropriate behavior after his misconduct may have resulted in a dog's death, ABC News reported.

Officer Paul Stephens pulled over Michael Gonzalez for speeding at 100 miles an hour down an interstate highway, prompting the driver to get out of the car, saying, "He's dying."

Gonzales and his girlfriend Krystal Hernandez explained that they were speeding to reach a veterinary clinic because their pet poodle Missy was choking.

The dashboard camera of the police car shows Officer Stephens yelling and criticizing the couple for putting other people's lives at risk for a dog.

"You're driving down the highway at 100 per hour," he said. "It's a dog, it's OK. You can get another one. Relax."

Stephens kept Gonzalez on the roadside for 15 minutes. The dog died as the couple waited for Stephens to issue a citation.

The couple tried to convince the officers several different ways to allow them to save their pet, KWTX Channel 10 News reported.

Gonzalez and Hernandez said they begged Stephens to let them go to the vet and turn themselves in for the speeding ticket later.

Gonzalez also offered to stay behind with the officer while Hernandez took the dog to the vet.

But Stephens ignored their pleas.

Police supervisors called the incident a "rookie mistake" and did not found Stephens guilty of any misconduct.

"This was not our finest hour," said San Marcos Police Chief Howard Williams.

However, Williams did say that Stephens behavior was less than stellar.

"His world was collapsing. And what the officer says to him, basically, is, 'I don't care,'" Williams said.

Earlier this week, a police officer in Arizona was acquitted of charges of animal cruelty after leaving a police dog in a patrol car for 13 hours on a hot day last summer, the Associated Press reported.

Recent examples of police misconduct towards people are unfortunately no less appalling and usually include the use of tasers.

Police in South Carolina punched a teenage boy 13 times in the face before tasering him as he lay prone on the ground.

Police tasered an injured teen from Ozark, Missouri up to 19 times after he fell from a highway overpass in late July.

The 16-year-old had broken his back and heel when the officers began tasering him.

In yet another bizarre instance of police violence, a 66-year-old minister was tasered and beaten by hospital security guards for what he claims was a joke.

In that incident, hospital security cameras caught five officers kicking Rev. Al Poisson on the ground for at least five minutes.

Source / The Raw Story

Choking pet dies while owner waits for traffic ticket -- ABC News



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