Some see this is a particularly bizarre crime story. Other see this as an opportunity to make jokes. From Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy :
It is often reported that child rapists are often treated as pariahs even among the most hardened criminal is prison. Consequently, this stunning local sentencing story prompted the (serious?) question in the title of this post. The article — which has an ending that led me to double-check it wasn’t from The Onion — is headlined “N.Y. super who had sex with dog gets prison.” Here are the details:
An apartment building superintendent who was caught on tape entering a unit and having sex with the tenant’s puppy was sentenced to prison Tuesday.
Alan Kachalsky thought something in his apartment was amiss for months — blinds drawn that had not been, a window left open that he had left shut. But nothing ever went missing, and, fearing he may come off as paranoid, Kachalsky never went to the police. Instead, he set up three cameras and waited. Kachalsky shared his apartment at the Rye Colony Cooperative Apartments with a male Labrador puppy, Gunner, who, unbeknownst to Kachalsky, was the real target of the burglar.
The burglar, it turned out, wasn’t there to steal anything, Kachalsky said Tuesday, but for something far more unimaginable. Kachalsky, an attorney, said it never occurred to him that someone was returning to have sex with his dog. Kachalsky turned over the video to police, who questioned and arrested Nicaj on Feb. 9, 2012, for sex acts against the 1-year-old dog committed the day before.
From there, it goes to a place I would never have imagined.
Given the apparent happy ending for the victims of this crime, I am not sure whether to encourage off-color jokes about this case or to engage in serious analysis of the prosecution of this peculiar puppy rapist. Thus, I pose this dilemma to readers:
should we ponder, rigorously or comically, whether and how the victim dog’s tender age impacted the seemingly severe sentencing outcome?
should we worry, genuinely or jokingly, whether there are other puppy victims of this defendant who lacked the courage (and ability) to speak up about their abuse?
should we question, meaningfully or mirthfully, what the human victim here has now done with the contraband puppy porn than he inadvertently produced?
should we wonder, seriously or facetiously, whether upon release from prison the offender will be barred from going within 1000 feet of a pet store without prior approval of his probation officer?
Obviously, this is bizarre conduct, sufficiently off-the-charts nuts that it seem almost Onion-like. But it isn’t a joke, and bestiality (like necrophilia) happens. Is this funny? Are we so jaded that we can indulge in dark humor to the extent reflected by this post?
There is nothing about what was done to a puppy that strikes me as humorous, even indirectly. This is just sick stuff. Am I missing something here?
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I got the impression that SLP was trying to use this as a critique of how sex abusers are treated by the system. But, maybe I’m just in a good mood today and seeing the best in everyone, since I’ve just ended two weeks of hell.
And what part of questioning the differential treatment of human and animal sex abusers compelled making a joke of the latter?
No, you are not “missing something.” The media and our society as a whole regularly make jokes at the expense of terrible suffering by animals. How many times, for example, have we witnessed the news anchor chuckling over scenes of a terrified cow or pig that is wandering around after escaping (usually on the way to the slaughterhouse). How about the clips we are treated to each year by news outlets, depicting the “running of the bulls” in Spain. As, in ‘Look at the people get chased by the bulls! Hahaha – what fun!’ (What a sick “tradition” – to take a healthy, beautiful bull and torture it to death for entertainment. And yet look how serious the media gets as soon as one of these sadistic “runners” gets hurt, even slightly.) Meanwhile, there is no end to the ridiculous debate over whether a day-old embryo is a “human” with a “soul” and therefore should not be experimented on.
It’s been said that our humorous take on such animal-related events masks a deeper level of anxiety and disturbance that we really feel (that is, we laugh nervously b/c we’re really disturbed), something which I believe.
SHG, we’re laughing at the pervert, not the victim. You seem to have empathy with the victim. And of course there’s nothing funny about it from that standpoint. Our laughter is more prosecutorial; along the lines of, “My, my, what do we have here?”
You gave us four good leads for lawyerly humor at the end of your post, and a possibly sly reference to happy endings. Sometimes humor is a good alternative to outrage.
I understand the role of dark humor in dealing with human conduct and harm. This didn’t strike me as anything close to dark humor, but just cheap (and flagrant) laughs that trivialized what happened as if it was nothing more than fodder for easy jokes.
Its also common for people to joke about what happens to sex offenders in prison even though nobody ever deserves to be viciously gang raped.
Professor Berman was basically making a prison rape joke as if prison rape is a laughing matter rather than a serious social pathology. He of all people should know better.