You Have To Kill More Than A Ferret To Make A Murder
There were candles in the wind. There were mourners, nearly 60 of them, huddled Sunday night near the Spokane County Courthouse steps.
There were damp eyes and angry calls for justice. As the crowd stood in silence, a stocky man read a poem about innocent lives snuffed out by a sadistic killer.
But this vigil wasn’t in remembrance of victims of drunken drivers or the Oklahoma City bombing. Nor was it to grieve the 17 women who have been slain and dumped around Spokane since 1984.
This wasn’t even about Diana, Princess of Wales.
These people lighted candles on a brisk December night to eulogize 93 ferrets. The long, furry animals were killed cruelly last month at the home of a woman who breeds and sells them for pets.
A ferret vigil.
I’m not positive, but I think if you look in the book of Revelation, ferret vigils are sandwiched between famine and earthquakes as a sign of the apocalypse.
Before I get myself in any deeper, let me clarify something:
I like animals, always have. I don’t condone animal mistreatment of any kind. What happened to Jean Smith’s ferrets is particularly loathsome.
Police believe her roommate, Lance Seurer, 20, systematically killed the animals Nov. 19 by stabbing them and possibly injecting them with bleach.
Seurer, who is scheduled to be arraigned today, is charged with multiple counts of animal cruelty. If convicted, he certainly should be punished - but accordingly within the animal abuse statutes.
Some of these ferret lovers want much more.
Many consider the crime comparable to violence against humans. This is where their cause moves from legitimate sorrow into the wacky world of animal rights extremism.
One ferret owner wants Seurer put away for 25 to 30 years. “That would make me feel OK,” she says.
Another compared the ferret massacre to the work of a budding Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.
All serial killers “started with animals,” she says. “It’s a documented fact.”
The plight of Spokane’s fallen ferrets has become an international crusade thanks to the Internet. One indignant writer argued via e-mail that the ferret deaths should have evoked the same outrage as if a similar number of preschoolers had been murdered at a day-care center.
The Spokane vigil was planned by a Georgia ferret lover chatting with New Zealander Sam Young. By e-mail, she sent the aforementioned ferret requiem which was read by Scott Sackett:
A roomful of babies,
A roomful of hope,
A roomful of lives,
Now gone up in smoke. …
Who is the worse psychopath? wonders Dori Burnell, 41, a few minutes after the poem was read - “someone who kills one person or someone who methodically murders 93 ferrets?
“I say the one who kills 93 animals.”
I say you could kill off every freaking ferret on the planet and never come close to matching the value of a single human life.
Smith equates the ferret deaths with coming home and finding that some fiend had killed “your entire family.”
No, Jean. This is more like coming home and discovering some fiend has wiped out your livestock.
Such a loss is terrible, but it’s not murder. Putting animals on a par with people only cheapens humanity.
Many at the vigil brought their pets. The little buggers certainly are cute, although their cloying musky odor drives me away.
Why does society draw “the line between two-legged and four-legged?” asks Serena Kilmer. “A life’s a life.”
Anyone who buys that must think Hong Kong is committing another Holocaust.
In an attempt to combat a new and deadly “bird flu,” the Hong Kong government plans to kill off 1.2 million chickens.
I doubt Spokane has enough candles to hold a proper chicken vigil.
, DataTimes