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• Investigation of Marine in puppy video may be over soon 4/28/08

CONTACT THE HERALD

Robert Frank, City Editor frank@heraldnet.com

Where to start with puppy-throwing video?

Julie Muhlstein
Herald Columnist

Seeing it answers none of my questions.

Of course I've watched it. At the end of the online video showing what looks to be a U.S. Marine chucking a puppy off a cliff, the thrower makes a little shrug.

It's a sarcastic spin on a don't-ask-me gesture. It's as if the body language is saying not even he knows the answers.

What is it we're seeing, exactly? Where? And for pity's sake, why?

The video clip says a lot about a lot, whatever the truth of it.

My first impulse was to write only about animal cruelty, and the vehement reactions that reports of it always bring. It's a topic I covered 10 years ago, when a pregnant mare named "Baby Face" was stabbed to death in Bellevue.

The public raised thousands of dollars as a reward in hopes the horse killer would be caught. At about the same time, a 2-month-old Everett girl died. The Snohomish County medical examiner determined she'd been shaken to death.

A Herald reporter covering that case told me not a single reader had called her about the child. Yet her phone kept ringing, with offers to pay an Edmonds family's veterinary bills, when she wrote about two men charged with torturing cats.

I have a beloved old dog at home, and a nice cat. My boy even talked me into a hamster, a critter that's made him the envy of his friends. Our late goldfish, Gill, is buried in the back yard, with a stone marker. No question, I love animals.

Still, I am mystified that harm to people rarely stirs up such heated emotions as the abuse of animals does. In the decade since I wrote about the disparity, that hasn't changed.

In Monroe, home of the family of a Marine apparently with the same last name heard on the puppy video, the household has received threats. Online harassers have even targeted city officials and a business employing the man's mother.

The Herald reporter who wrote in 1998 about the tortured cats and the shaken toddler was Rebecca Hover, now spokeswoman for the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. On Tuesday, Hover said of the Monroe family, "We want to make sure they are safe in their home."

What has changed drastically in 10 years is how people, particularly teens and young adults, use the Internet. The puppy-pitching video seen on YouTube and other Web sites is an extreme illustration.

Whether it shows a real act of cruelty or a sick joke, it spread rapidly through the virtual world, and on to the news media. In Monroe, real people are suffering real-world consequences. Perhaps, too, career-crushing consequences will come for the clip's creators.

Today's young people are incredibly tech-smart. Hand them a camera, hand them a laptop, they're instant filmmakers with worldwide distribution. Their hands wield immediate power -- more power than some likely ever intended.

Using technical skills isn't the same as using your head.

Ever peeked at MySpace? I have, enough to see a lot of stuff meant to be inside jokes on a site that's largely open to the public. Young people have grown up communicating with friends online. Do they stop to consider that blogs, photos and video posted online aren't private? Content they share may be out there for anyone to see and to spread, and it may live on for years?

At random Thursday, I picked one of the "Cool New People" on MySpace. It was Bryce, whose profile says he's 29 and from Midland, Texas. There are photos of nearly nude women. One picture shows a baby eyeing a Playboy magazine -- with a caption "half pint love." From Bryce's MySpace page, you can click to a "friend" who posted a video of what looks to be a cop stripping.

Maybe Bryce's kids (the profile says "proud dad") don't care. Maybe his boss doesn't care, or know -- not yet.

It's all just a big joke, right? Sick or funny, cute or raunchy, it's all out there.

When I watch the grinning guy in Marine garb throw the pup, I'm disgusted.

When I read some of the thousands of online comments about the video -- everything from hate for Americans to wishes that the uniformed pair be similarly treated -- it occurs to me that this guy isn't just holding a dog by the scruff of its neck.

He's got a dangerous tiger by the tail.



Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.