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Comment by supersystem | Hacker News Reader

"The man seen fondling a cow’s vagina in the newly released video eventually spent 102 days in jail."

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-cow-abuse-v...

Annoyingly, that description is too vague to tell if it's actual abuse or just 'look at me touch a taboo spot'. And I'd rather not watch the video to find out. The fact that he went to jail doesn't clarify, because he did many other things such as jumping on a cow for an extended period.

If you don't watch the video yourself, how can you trust a description to be accurate, and then form your own opinion on whether such acts (and undercover filming of such acts) should be illegal? I watched it, my own take is that it's nothing special in terms of disturbing material. The other video from PETA linked on this page shows more perverse acts but is also not very disturbing overall. The video on meat.org is probably the worst in this particular genre I've seen.

> If you don't watch the video yourself, how can you trust a description to be accurate, and then form your own opinion on whether such acts (and undercover filming of such acts) should be illegal?

What are you talking about? I explicitly said the description is too vague to make meaningful conclusions about.

I guess I should have s/ a / any /. The description may have said "The video depicts a man repeatedly inserting a hot iron into the cow's vagina", which to me doesn't seem very vague, but isn't what happened in that video. "Fondling" is appropriate but as you say somewhat vague. So how are you supposed to know without watching the video?

I was fishing for a slightly better description, maybe half a sentence or so, and then I was going to trust it. The specific case isn't critical enough for me to feel the need to verify by watching an unpleasant video.

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