Bad seeds of East Bernard

Just about the time people start believing they can't hear anything more disgusting on the nightly news, they run across a story like last week's report about four East Bernard High School baseball team members who decided to torture and kill a cat that was the unofficial mascot of the local baseball field.

The four baseball team members, whom a Wharton County Sheriff's Department investigator described as "good kids (who) did a bad thing," put the cat in a bag and beat it unmercifully with baseball bats before repeatedly running over the bag and what was left of the cat with a pickup truck.

Much like an earlier and equally sick incident in Silsbee, Texas, where a group of middle school and high school students beat a horse to death with rocks and clubs, the East Bernard story creates a lot more questions than it generates answers. The most obvious is, "How could anyone from a town like East Bernard do something like this?"

EB, as the locals call it, is a quiet little rice-farming community located about 60 miles southwest of Houston which sits at the intersection of two state highways. The town has a dozen or so streets that don't go more than seven or eight blocks in any direction.

East Bernard High School's sports teams are virtual fixtures in statewide postseason playoffs. A billboard on the outskirts of town listing the school's state championship teams was filled to capacity several years ago, and a new billboard had to be erected.

Most of EB's citizens are direct descendants of the area's original Bohemian and German settlers. The town has relatively little crime, most of which originates from outside the community. A quick description of the citizens would be: "churchgoing people with high moral and family values."

So, where did four of these families go wrong, or what did they omit when they passed those values on to their children?

Cruelty to animals is a red-flag warning signal of possible future acts of social and moral irresponsibility. It strongly suggests these students may have serious psychological problems.

In a town where farming and livestock are an integral part in everyday life, an act of cruelty to an animal is more than a warning; it suggests a serious decay of the community's moral fiber.

Granted, senseless acts of cruelty against animals do not equate senseless acts of cruelty against innocent people. But those students need both serious help and serious punishment. If the baseball team members get nothing but a slap on the wrist, they will join that decadent fraternity of athletes who believe they should be judged by a different standard from everyone else because they are athletes and, therefore, something special.

The sheriff's department and the courts need to seriously get these boys' attention and keep it for a long time. Their punishment should not be easy.

Children who are mean to animals grow up to be mean to people. We don't need any more of those kind people than we already have.