Verified by 
Derek Anderson, my former student
Serial killers are hot right now. It seems like half of the psych majors at my university want to be FBI profilers, even though my colleagues in forensic psychology tell me criminal profiling is mostly TV bullshit.
Oddly, one of my former students was a serial killer. I knew him as Derek Anderson, but his real name was Allen Krnak (the correct spelling). In 1998, a couple of years after he graduated from Western Carolina University where I teach psychology, he murdered his father, his mother, his younger brother and the family dog, a cocker spaniel. He killed them in Wisconsin but then hauled some of their bodies back to the North Carolina mountains. A year later, a hunter stumbled on his father's bones up Moses Creek, about five miles from my house. The dog's remains were found nearby, but the mom and brother never turned up. (Killing the dog puts Derek in the minority of serial killers; most of them do not have a known history of animal abuse.)
After Derek was arrested, the Asheville television station sent a reporter out to interview me. After all, he had taken several of my classes and I was his advisor. Further, I am a psychologist and I spent three years working in a military psychiatric hospital. So you might think that I would have had something insightful to tell the reporter about my student, the murderer.
Wrong. I just stupidly looked at the camera and mumbled the classic cliche...."Well, he was quiet and kind of shy, but he seemed like a nice guy."
Derek is presently serving life without parole. But now there is another serial killer in my life. And, like Derek, she is quiet and kind of shy and she seems nice enough. But, unlike Derrick, she has four legs and purrs.
Tilly, another serial killer My Serial Killer
Tilly, another serial killer
My Serial Killer
Two years ago a friend told my wife Mary Jean that the woman who runs the feed and seed store over in Tuckasegee had rescued an abandoned kitten under Moody Bridge. She needed to find a home for it because her other cat hated it. "Should I go take a look at it?" I asked Mary Jean? Sure, she says. Predictably, one look at the little kitty and I was a goner. She was midnight black, helpless, with big innocent eyes. Who could resist? We named her Tilly, after Tilly Creek, a small stream that runs near our house.
As a kitten, Tilly was cute, loveable, and playful. (She still is.) But eventually, her Derek Anderson side emerged, and by the time she was six months old, she had morphed into a compulsive murderer. It started with the occasional live mouse she would bring in the house to play with. As she got bigger, so did her prey. Last Monday, in a feline version of the horse scene in The Godfather, she deposited a fresh rabbit head on our front porch. And on Tuesday I found a pile of crimson cardinal feathers by the back door. Once I saw Tilly chase down a young rabbit. For a couple of seconds I asked myself what was more important: her right to kill the rabbit or my right to deprive her of her rights? Then I charged down the steps and saved the bunny.
Do Animal Rights Extend To Recreational Killers?
For pet lovers, life with a recreational killer poses serious dilemmas over the question of animal rights. The philosopher Bernard Rollin bases his argument for animal rights on the notion that every species has a telos - a fundamental nature or purpose -- that we need to respect. As he puts it, "fish gotta swim; birds gotta fly." And, by this logic, "Cats gotta kill." (I don't think Bernie would extend the telos argument to two-legged serial killers.)
There is, of course, an obvious solution to living with one of nature's most efficient killing machines. I could force my values on Tilly by making her spend her life inside the big comfy prison that I call my house. The up-side would be that the critters around our house would be safer. Plus Tilly would probably have a longer life. (The average life of an outdoor cat is about a third that of an indoor cat.)
The down-side of depriving her of the right to go outside and hunt is that she would be miserable. Indeed, I think it would be cruel for me to force her to spend her days sitting on the window sill, watching tasty sparrows and towhees flit by. And my veterinarian friend, Joe Bill Matthews, tells me that some cats develop stress related health problems if they are forced to live indoors. I am pretty sure that Tilly would fit into this category.
So, in part because I live in the woods with hardly any automobile traffic, I have decided to respect Tilly's telos and give her the right to come and go, more or less, as she pleases. She usually spends a couple of hours a day outside and always comes in at night. My (admittedly weak) justification is that if I were a cat, I would rather be afforded the right to roam in the woods where the wild things are than spend my life imprisoned in a house even if it means having to cope with the neighbor's nasty tomcat and taking my chances with the local coyote.
Am I OK with my decision to give Tilly the right to be what my vet calls "a real cat" -- by which she means a cat that hunts? Not really.
When I give talks about the psychology of human-animal interactions, I am sometimes asked if I feel guilty about eating animals. My response is "No. I have made my peace with eating meat." But then I confess that I have not resolved my guilt about being the owner of a cat. I still feel bad when I have to chase a chipmunk around my living room or hose animal guts off the driveway.
But I guess that comes with the territory when you live with a serial killer.
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To learn more about the conflict between cats and wildlife see this Animals and Us blog.
For more about the strange case of Derek Anderson, read this.
Hal Herzog is the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard To Think Straight About Animals.
