Three times in my life I hurt animals. It happened when I was a kid. Once, I got hold of a big fat toad and I took him into a little secluded area between two large pine trees in our back yard. The branches of the trees hung low and provided a sort of natural screen and the space in between them was soft and covered in pine needles. Anyway, I took a stick and for no reason I can remember I started stabbing the toad in the back. The stick kept breaking and I felt bad about it and stopped doing it. Another time, I got a B-B gun for Christmas and I went out into the back yard and found a bird sitting on a branch and shot it and killed it. I stood over it, looking at it on the ground, dead from one shot, not even twitching. I don’t remember feeling bad about it but I don’t remember feeling good about it either, and I never did it again. Then there was the time that I got really mad at our dog, a beagle and just yelled at it and screamed at it until it cowered in a corner. I don’t remember why I was mad at it. I suppose I could make the case that my anger towards these animals stemmed from the fact that I was continuously getting yelled at and berated by my parents for no particular reason other than being alive, but I don’t think it’s fair to the animals to excuse my behavior. They didn’t deserve what I did to them.