Killers Arrested for Preventing Slaughter?

Welcome to The Twilight Zone, otherwise known as The Sunshine State . . . Florida.

Just north of me last week, three lovely young gentlemen (Caleb Smith, 21; John Richmond, 18; and Anthony Strickland, 26) were out for a night on the town and decided, for reasons yet unknown, to include the killing and dismembering of a calf in their evening's festivities.

Disgusting, yes.
Immoral, yes.
Creepy, yes.
Thoughtless, heartless, you name it.

Who the heck are their parents and how did they get this way? I'm just curious.

But here's the set-up for weird part: their victim was a calf they tore from his or her mother. The calf lived on a ranch, owned by one Peter Holman. The men broke the "livestock fence" to gain access to the "property" of Holman. The "property" was six-months old and worth about $500. The "property" was one of 90 other such "properties" of Holman.

The men shot and dismembered the calf in front of his or her mother, and were so meticulously clean about their activities that the Sheriff's deputies located them by simply following the trail of blood that led to one of their homes. The calf's head was found in a ditch where the murder took place.

Ready for the weird part (because, you know, all of that was really normal)?

"The mother cow was looking in the ditch," Holman said. "She stayed there for 24 hours. They killed the calf right in front of the mother cow. I want to see them punished to the fullest extent of the law."

I can't even begin to imagine the anguish of the grieving mother, and I don't even want to imagine what might be going on between the ears of the three charged with this crime. However, how twisted is it that the rancher, whose "property" exists to go to slaughter, wants the killers punished for preventing him from killing his "property" on his own time and in his own way? Perhaps the manner in which he was going to create his end result is different from what the men did, but the result is the same: the calf dies. Holman should just come out and say he's angry because the killing represents lost income; his outrage, the way it's expressed, is bizarre.

Welcome to The Twilight Zone, 1984, and unfortunately, the US of A in 2008, where murder of an individual is called destruction of property; where premeditated, institutionalized killing of sentient humans isn't murder at all; and where it's unthinkably vicious to tear one individual calf from his or her mother in the dead of night, but it's perfectly acceptable to do it on a mass scale, on a schedule, in the light of day.