Dear Editor,

It is difficult to address the Cody Roberts wolf torture story without injecting emotion one way or the other. This story instantly brings emotions to the surface; raw emotions such as disgust, anger, sadness, outrage, defensiveness, fear and division, and so on.

It takes a certain measure of courage and bravery for the Pinedale Roundup to even report on such an emotional story. I have seen that you are being accused of biased reporting and not telling the whole story. What an impossible position for you to be in. There is no good side to this disgusting display of (my emotion) callous behavior.

(Callous–unemotional traits. This term refers to patterns of callousness, uncaring behavior, reduced guilt, and reduced empathy. When such traits accompany mental disorders, they typically occur in children with conduct disorder.)

I do not live in the city. I know where meat comes from. I eat wild game and in Wisconsin, we live with a wolf population of 1,500+ wolves. Emotions regarding wolves run high here as well. People are upset that the deer population is down. No doubt wolf poaching occurs. The hunters who I know pride themselves on clean kills. Whether it is a deer for the freezer, or shooting a porcupine that is girdling a pine tree, animals should be dispatched with clean kills.

What Cody and his supporters did was torture an animal in one of the most barbaric and bloodthirsty ways possible. It was 100 percent callous and cowardly.

His aunt Jeanne Ive-Roberts doubled down and mocked the cruelty in support of her cowardly nephew. The outrage and anger is deserved. There is no equivalence — don’t bring up abortion, or the kid stabbed at the mall to justify or minimize a callous and cowardly act.

Lastly, the outrage is not just coming from tree-hugging, leftists and Democrats. I am a conservative Republican, and the outrage and anger are coming from Republicans and hunters as well. Cody Roberts and his supporters have doubled down on their support of this cowardly torture of an animal. They have shown zero remorse, and now they try to spin Cody as a victim because of how this is affecting his family. They are victims of their own stupidity and lack of morals.

Thank you, Pinedale Roundup, for being brave enough to report on this. Life was better before I heard the name “Cody Roberts.”

Andrew Kirgerome, Wisconsin