Mar 05 2008
The Marine-Puppy Story: Cruel Bastard or Cruel Hoax? Plus: The local connection
This has gone viral and its not pretty. Viewer beware.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rqvFNaWHdz0
Watch on your own time, I won't post it. Now, speculation is ripe with theories it is a hoax, that the puppy was already dead, that its actions and sounds do not match a real puppy:
Update: Getting lots of e-mails about the fact that puppy isn’t struggling and how the yelp when it’s thrown doesn’t seem to trail away. Here’s one from reader David V.:
The sounds are all wrong in that clip of the “puppy throwing.”
I’ve been involved with dogs since I was 12, breeding and training, and there is no way the sounds in that Youtube video were coming from a real puppy. If you actually hurled a puppy by the scruff of its neck, the first sound you would hear would be a loud scream as it was launched, because you would have very nearly torn its neck off. Notice, though, the puppy is completely silent as it is thrown. The ridiculous yelping noises don’t start until after the pup is airborne.
That’s your second problem, because just as a human needs to take repeated breaths to keep yelling, a dog must be breathing in order to yelp. (Imagine trying to scream while spinning head-over-heels in the air.) The puppy would have gone completely stiff as it flew, tensing up and spreading its legs to try to cushion the fall. Definitely no gasping for breath and yelping.
Final problem - there is no way that a crap camera like the one used to shoot that video would be able to pick up an airborne puppy’s faint yelping from dozens of yards away, yet the “yelping” barely decreases in volume during the puppy’s flight.
I don’t know what was thrown - probably a dead puppy - but I am absolutely certain that there is no way on earth the noises in the video were made by the puppy we see there.
I dunno. And really, a part of me does not care. Sick is sick, and even if they faked it, it is a lousy joke, and pretty pointless.
And someone tell me, what the hell is the point of posting it on Youtube?
What pisses me off is how the anti war and anti military activists and PETA will take this and paint all servicemen as cruel assholes, and protest accordingly.
Point: This is not a Military issue. The fact is that in high school, college, the Military and since I have known people who are indeed sick enough to do that, so the possibility is certainly real. You may have known them, you may still.
Regardless, if this is real, it is a cruel bit of "fun". If this is a hoax it is still a cruel bit of "fun".
I will not accept "fog of war" as an excuse, or "just a dog" either.
As Dear Abby said: "The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back."
And this has an uncomfortable local angle. Apparently the thrower is from the Seattle area:
Video of Marine tossing puppy prompts threats to Monroe family
A Monroe family received threatening telephone calls this week after a video apparently showing a Marine throwing a puppy over a cliff in Iraq surfaced on the Internet.
Since it was first posted early this week, the video has become an Internet sensation, gaining widespread attention from news sites, bloggers and animal-rights activists. Hundreds of people have left comments on various Web postings of the video. Some posters have included the Snohomish County home address and telephone number of the alleged puppy-thrower, as well as the names of his family members.
Now, if you want to vilify the person who did this, and hold him accountable I am there. But stop threatening people who had nothing to do with it.
This is just dumb.
So bottom line, while this video may display the worst of a man, the fact is that only that man (and those who stood by and watched) is responsible.
Targeting the family thousands of miles away shows the worst side of people too, and serves no purpose.
Trackposted to Rosemary's Thoughts, A Blog For All, 123beta, Right Truth, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, Big Dog's Weblog, Cao's Blog, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Adeline and Hazel, Nuke Gingrich, Faultline USA, Allie is Wired, Wake Up America, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, DragonLady's World, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Celebrity Smack, Wolf Pangloss, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Dumb Ox Daily News, A Newt One, Stageleft, Right Voices, Gone Hollywood, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
8 Responses to “The Marine-Puppy Story: Cruel Bastard or Cruel Hoax? Plus: The local connection”
Leave a Reply
You can track future comments on this post via this RSS feed. You can trackback this post by pinging this URL.
Allowed HTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
Excellent commentary, Karl. I hope it is a hoax. I hadn’t even thought of that, but that’s a much less repulsive explanation than the alternative. Either way, its cruel. People who will mistreat animals will usually mistreat humans as well.
My daughter called from California wanting to know what I thought of it. It had actually upset her to watch it. She said the puppy had yelped as they threw it over. I didn’t watch it cause I didn’t want to.
It looked like it was already dead to me…
Most likely scenario that I could think of…
-Marine squad on patrol finds dead puppy along side the road
-their first notion is to get rid of it, gully is close by
-Marines being generally bored in a warzone has some twisted fun and figured puppy is already dead, who cares.
-Marine disposes of dead puppy in gully and fellow squad members make imature noises from behind camera.
step three, Profit?
The puppy looks alive to me - and I breed dogs.
When a puppy is held by the scruff of his neck he becomes motionless, this puppy IS alive, his legs are drawn up in the typical pose of a pup being carried by his mother, if he were dead then his legs would hang limply.
Words cannot express the disgust I felt when I watched that video - what a BIg Brave Marine this loser is - don’t care what he has seen or been through - there is no excuse for this blatent cruelty. It also makes me wonder what goes on out there that we don’t see.
Speaking only to your final comment, the fact is that similar cruelty happens everywhere, military and civilian, every day. We just do not always get treated to YouTube evidence.
I say this not to deflect criticism in this particular case, but to keep this in perspective.
This is not a war issue, or a Military one. It is a problem in human nature, that sometimes people are cruel.
I totally agree with audio. I was saying the same thing 2 days ago. A hand held phone camera or really any camera would not be able to record the puppies yelping with no drop off. the yelping audio would have faded perportional to the distance.
The clearly audible thud when the pup hits the ground blows the mic isn’t sensitive enough theory away. Anyway, the problem with most consumer video equipment is the mics are too sensitive and omni-directional. A yelping puppy is not a quiet thing and would be picked up quite well over a distance much further than this one was thrown, particularly in an environment like that with all those hard, reflective surfaces. The sound has a slight doppler shift and reduction in volume as well as the tone and rasp sounding completely authentic. Pretty clear to a discerning ear. The dismissal that it would have screamed the instant it was thrown shows another hole in the self-proclaimed expert, David V’s, analysis. There would have been a moment of silence from the sudden violence of the action as the pup would be in at least a brief shock and drawing breath. The rapid yelps are exactly what one hears from a puppy in distress. “Imagine trying to scream while spinning head-over-heels in the air.” Go to any theme park with extreme rides and you’ll hear plenty of people doing just that. David V. clearly isn’t the authority he thinks he is. As Gil G. observed, the posture was one of a live pup when held by the scruff of the neck - legs drawn up so they don’t drag the ground when carried by their mother. The body is visibly loose when the killer moves, but it is not limp, with limbs dangling, as it would be if freshly dead. There are no signs of rigor mortis , bloating, blood, maggots, or flies. Sad to say, but it’s pretty obvious that this was no hoax.
68d78db2411b…
68d78db2411b3368fcfe…
The so-called “clearly audible thud” could easily be faked too. i think it’s a sick joke… but nothing more.