Lee, WTH? really just fabricate things apart from historical facts.
The thieves put people's very lives at risk. There were no buses to jump on out in the middle of uncivilized country, and no welfare to feed family or children when people were deprived of ability to plow their fields.
It was the thieves who had already disregarded human lives, not their victims.
Lest you think I'm making things up, I copy & paste below.
;-]
"......... in the United States during the 19th century. During that time the Great Plains states, Texas, and other western states were sparsely populated and negligibly policed. As farmers tilled the land and migrants headed west through the Great Plains, their horses became subject to theft. Since these farmers and migrants depended on their horses, horse thieves garnered a particularly pernicious reputation because they left their victims helpless or greatly handicapped by the loss of their horses. The victims needed their horses for transportation and farming. Such depredation led to the use of the term horse thief as an insult, one that conveys the impression of the insulted person as one lacking any shred of moral decency."
that is actually still ON topic, just for realistic balance:
fishkeepers already feed other fish to their own pet fish. no way killing fish will be weighed on the same scale as torturing other animals by the judicial system. most likely the property value/loss would be prosecuted.
and TBH, a swift kill of fish is not on the "sociopathic scale" of torturing animals for sadistic pleasure (no matter how much you insist so), like psychos slowly carving cats up, setting dogs on fire or other such things. wack jobs enjoy that suffering.
Not everyone who kills something has the psycho-social makeup to move up the scale.
There is much imbalance in society now as to the "normative" views of what is acceptable, bad, and the worst end of the scale for people to do. and more so, for what others feel self-righteous being outraged about.
IMO.
