Those PETA videos really upset me, but I’ve watched a lot of them for a reason I have yet to figure out. I don’t support PETA at all and I realize that a lot of it is propaganda, but they’re real videos and real people harming real animals, and that bugs me. It may make me a bad person, but the abused animal videos bother me a whole lot more than the starving kids. How horrible is that? No, I don’t want kids to starve to death and I think it’s awful, but those videos/commercials don’t get to me like the animal ones do.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I remember a video I saw on Maury forever ago in which a male nanny was caught via hidden camera smothering a baby with a pillow in its crib. I clearly recall the babies legs kicking, but it was completely helpless. I’m not sure if he actually harmed the child, but I’ll never forget that video. Those little legs kicking desperately was heartbreaking.
I’ve seen A LOT of videos and images that people would describe as “disturbing,” but hardly any of it really affects me. I mean, I used to visit rotten.com on a regular basis just to see what new gory stuff they’d put up. Last semester, I took a course called Analyzing Homicide and we had two guest speakers that showed really gory pictures of actual cases they’d investigated or bodies they’d examined. Rotting corpses, gunshot wounds, brains and guts splattered everywhere. Someone in my class had to get up and leave and a few others turned away whenever a new picture came up, and yet I was completely unfazed. I’m not sure what that says about me…