this dog’s life

Let’s say that one day, you decide that you want a dog. Being a conscientious sort, you visit a kennel and decide upon an 8 week old puppy, big brown eyes, and floppy ears, cute as can be. You take the puppy home and give it attention, love, patience and understanding. You train it, hopefully through firm but painless reinforcement, to be a good dog… in other words, not to bite, pee in the house, beg, etc.

The puppy grows quickly into a healthy, well-trained, dog. The dog has made some mistakes here and there – soiled a rug, chewed on a shoe – but through firm and constant reinforcement, the dog has learned what is and what is not acceptable. Then one day, something happens.

The dog attacks another dog. Your first instinct is to forgive, but you know that this behavior is unacceptable and you let the dog know, in very certain terms, that you will not tolerate that behavior. A few months pass and the dog attacks another dog, provoked or unprovoked is not important, this time drawing blood.

Again, you practice patience and discipline the dog again, knowing that a dog that consistently attacks other dogs is not only unacceptable, but also dangerous. Despite every attempt to correct this behavior, the dog fails to learn. It attacks another dog, this time it kills. Knowing full well that you have made every attempt to control the dog, every attempt to socialize the animal, you know that this dog poses a danger to other dogs as well as humans because of its very aggressive nature. You have two choices; the first is to lock the dog up, preventing him from socializing with other animals. The second is to put the dog down, destroying any opportunity for future misbehavior.

A dog is a social animal by nature. Eliminating the ability to socialize isn’t necessarily going to eliminate the behavior, just postpone the behavior until the opportunity to attack presents itself yet again. The dog will then seek out ways to run free of restraint; escaping if need be to satisfy the urge to attack. The only real logical solution is to destroy the dog, eliminating the problem completely.

The same theory can be applied to inanimate objects as well. If you buy a car and the car is defective in such a way as to present a clear and present danger to you and the public, you try to fix it. If no appropriate solution can be found, the car is taken apart, the metal crushed and recycled, thus destroying the car. Destroying things that do not serve the public interest is a necessity.

Granted both of these examples are overly simplistic, but this is still logical thinking. In fact, I can’t be the only one who believes this analogy also applies to human beings. If, through constant example, a human being proves that he/she is incapable of living by the laws of a given society, that human being loses the right to be a member of that society. Taken further, if that human being proves that they have such little regard for human life that they take it without remorse or forethought to the ramifications, that person should be eliminated from the gene pool. Elimination of that human being is not only acceptable, but also necessary to promote the general well being of the society as a whole. This logic is clear to me and when anyone believes differently, I am truly perplexed.

Another perplexing thing is the amount of money it costs to allow these obviously guilty people the ability to appeal indefinitely. If these people had applied that same tenacious attitude they use to prevent their own deaths to preventing themselves from being in a position in which they could become killers, perhaps they wouldn’t have landed on Death Row in the first place.

Speaking of Death Row, there are currently 38 states with the death penalty. As of the fall of 2001, there were approximately 3,701 inmates awaiting justice on Death Row. Of those, 1,691 are white, 1,598 are African American. The remaining 412 inmates are lightly distributed among other races and genders. The usual argument about the Death Penalty unfairly being given to people of color is completely untrue.

Personally, I think once the death penalty is given to a criminal, it should be carried out the next day. Why wait? The whole argument about it being better to free 1000 criminals than execute one innocent man borders on insanity. Fry them all and spend the money on social programs that will, in the long run, educate some of these animals and prevent future violence. And while we’re at it, let’s legalize all drugs, even dangerous drugs like heroin. Why? Well, the initial result will be that millions of idiots will die, eliminating morons from the gene pool… it’s all about the gene pool for me.