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In This Issue

• The Spec Almost Led Me Into White Slavery
• Where Have All the Strippers Gone?
• Abused by Geriatrics Without Prozac
• Letters to the Editor(s)
• Marauding Interviewer
• Free to Speak? Shut Up!
• Where It's Safe to Sodomize
• Unionized Columbians Become Denizens of Primal Gangland
• CAVA Shifts Focus from Medicine to Profitability
• Garment Grabber Liberates Clothes From Floor
• Legless Pigeon Recounts Tales of Early Abuse
• Geek has +9 Indifference Cloak Against Discrimination
• Columbia Hits Me Where the Bruises Will Never Show
• We Have a Film Critic?
• The Future Is Now, and It's Pointing and Laughing
• Juice Review - A Mango Juice Odyssey
• Fed Favorites
• I Hate You Damn Happy People
• Your Pets Will Be Waiting for You in Hell
• Fruitloop and Dandy
• Wacky Fun Abuse!
• My AIM is True
• A Word from Our Advertisers
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.7

Growing up, I always thought I had a pretty normal childhood. As I got older, I realized that, in fact, my parents were weird. Even worse, so was I. One thing that I partook in with a disturbing frequency was pet abuse. I'm not going to call PETA or anything, but besides the usual dress up, trapping in boxes/paper bags and tail-pulling, when we were feeling particularly ambitious, my stepfather and I would build what we called a "cheese house." After constructing a tall, unstable tower out of blocks, we'd place a piece of cheese somewhere near the top, and put the cat in front of the structure. The cat would go for the cheese, the tower would collapse all over him, and we'd laugh hysterically. In retrospect, I think that was pretty cruel and feel guilty for being such a horrible and menacing person. What has saved me from depression and the stairwell of McBain is some good old cultural relativism. I sent out an email survey to 60 friends and acquaintances asking for personal stories of pet abuse from the past and/or present. Nineteen people responded, and, man, you are some nasty motherfuckers. At least I'm not alone. If I'm going to hell I will have plenty of company in the eighth circle with the rest of you pet sodomizers.

Of the nineteen respondents (most mentioning abuse of more than one species), ten of you tortured cats, seven tortured dogs, and four, hamsters. You also manhandled crickets, turtles, newts, goldfish, fireflies, a parakeet, a rabbit, a chameleon and a little brother (although sibling abuse is a whole other bag of dead fish). Five of you confessed to murder, albeit to nothing larger than a hamster. A significant number of people relayed stories of friends' or relatives' misdeeds, and I counted those too, but everybody knows that you're lying to cover your ass.

You're also way more creative than I ever was. "I staged a performance of ‘Little Bunny Foo Foo'," wrote one respondent, "in which I dressed the hamsters up in costumes swiped from my Troll collection (giving a pink tutu to the hamster playing the fairy and bunny ears to the other one) and forced them to act out the song as if they were dolls. I remember getting really into this, going so far as to create a credits sequence that included a mock-up of the MGM ‘lion roaring' sign with a hole in it so that I could stick one of my hamster's heads through it."

Another person put on similar productions with the crickets he and his family used as bait when they went fishing (not pets, technically), except in Euripidean fashion (sorry, couldn't help myself) they "always end[ed] in the main characters' impaling and drowning".

Some of the abuse was more psychological: "When I got my cat we were told it was a girl. So we named it Maia, and treated it accordingly. About two months later, our vet said that he couldn't spay Maia because he had to NEUTER Maia because Maia was a boy; but because of the way we raised ‘him,' he's the biggest pansy I've ever met."

Some of you, like the kid with the "yippy little lhasa apso" who bit him on a daily basis, acclaimed to being on the receiving end of the abuse, while others, like the kid whose cat gave birth in his bed while he was sleeping in it, claimed it was an accident: "I woke up and all these little wet ugly things were in my bed... I swatted a couple of them away, and one fell on the floor. I woke my parents up with cries of ‘MOOMMMMYYY!! THERE ARE RATS IN MY BED!!!!'" Some did it out of love ("The dogs always got party hats on their birthdays," "My little brother drowned his hamster by giving it a bath in the bidet."), some out of neglect ("did not buy a heat rock [for my chameleon], crickets ate part of his face; although he did eventually kill and eat all the crickets, he got infected and died"), and some out of pure malice ("kicked cat because it was a health hazard in a restaurant. Felt pretty good about it"). But most of you just did it for fun.

I wanted to vomit when I read a few of your stories. "My friend pulled out her dog's chin whiskers with tweezers," wrote one person. "[The] hamster[‘s] intestines fell out of its ass and 3 out of 4 siblings poked the guts with a pencil repeatedly to hear it make that eep sound," wrote another. However, it was the following tale that affected me the most: "I killed my sister's hamster and never told her or my parents about it. My friend and I were playing with it when my sister wasn't home . . . and I got a little carried away. We put the hamster in the ball used to let it run around on the floor in . . . [and watched] the hamster run [and] the ball roll around. All very entertaining. Or not nearly enough, because I thought playing catch with the hamster in the ball would be more fun. I made my friend throw it back and forth a few times, [but] she wasn't that interested. I think I was taking out my dislike of my sister. . . on her hamster. I kept tossing the ball up and down up and down, higher and higher . . . Eventually I dumped the hamster back in the cage. I think the flight experience gave it a heart attack because when I checked back on it sometime in the next half hour it had stopped moving. I laughed, tried to get my friend to laugh, she didn't . . . And then I left it there for my sister to find." Needless to say, this story confirmed a lot of suspicions I'd previously held concerning the person who told it.

So what is there to say in conclusion? I think this issue sheds light on a certain aspect of the human condition, that the strong will always pick on the weak and have fun doing it. But it's more complicated than that, because we have voluntarily taken these helpless creatures into our homes and pledged to love and care and provide for them. And I'd much rather you beat up your dog than beat up your kid. Or would I? Whatever. I'll see you in hell.