Kids shooting pigeons

[shawna]

Hi!
I was walking my dog today and I passed a little park area with about 50 pigeons in the center of the park and benches surrounding them. Well there were 2 boys sitting on the benches and I saw that they had toy guns but I couldn't tell if they were b-b guns or not so i just kept walking and then I heard the boys laughing and saying whoa!!!!

So i went back and walked beside them and notice a plastic bag full of b-bs and the boys reloading their BB guns.....and all the pigeons were gone....

so i yelled at them and told them not to shoot the birds and said are you crazy why would you shoot the birds???!!! and they said "sorry, sorry" and looked at me like i was a crazy lady.... they were shocked!....but it really made me upset. I don't know what else i could have done....

[Karen]

Hi Shawna,

I think you did the best thing! You made them think about what they were doing and hopefully they will think before they shoot at live things again.

I once saw a small group of boys in the back of our apartment complex (which bordered on a rice field that had many creatures in it, frogs and birds etc) playing with a big grasshopper that it looked like they were going to kill. So I went over and the boy opened his hand to show me it. I picked it up and put it back in the grass by the stream. Yeah, they also looked at me like I was crazy and then giggled and ran away. I wish I could have made a sentence, but I think they got the point.

Anyway, I don't know that you could have done anything more. You're probably now known as "pigeon lady", though :D LOL

[dorothy and toto]

Kids are kids, it's true. It's not just kids in Korea who do things like that - to animals, to other smaller kids too. However, I think that in Korea there's far less awareness and I sense that kids here are just not really taught to let animals be, and see them as objects for their amusement. And when they look around, they see adults doing things like dumping dogs, kicking animals etc, so they don't see what they do as that bad.

Your experiences remind me of a scene from a Korean movie, "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring." It's about a boy who goes to live in a Buddhist temple with an old monk. The boy is very young and amuses himself by catching frogs in the stream and tying rocks to them so they can't swim, and watching them struggle. The Buddhist monk catches the boy doing this and as punishment he ties a huge rock to the boy and forces him to drag it behind him up the mountain, so he learns what the frogs and other creatures he does things to feel like in that situation. It reminds you that Buddhists traditionally value all life around them, not just human life. Excellent film.

[shawna]

Oh yes I completely agree that it is not only Korean children who can be cruel to animals..... They were lucky they weren't Canadian kids or I would have given it to them alot worse hahaha... That movie you were talking about sounds great.