A man is walking in the desert. He sees vultures circling in the distance and finally comes upon a dog laying in the sand. He sees the dog is suffering greatly. He knows what the right thing to do is. He pulls out the pistol he has on his side. As he points the barrel at the dog he sees the dog looking back at him, hoping this human will help him out. The dog is panting loudly, it's unable to stand, and the heat slowly killing it.
The man lines the sight up at the dog's head, closing his eyes, he can't bare to witness the event.
A loud bang.
Now whimpering, the dog sounds as frantic as it can muster with the lack of energy it has to express anything. The man opens his eyes and realizes the bullet went right by the head and into the hip of the dog which is now bleeding. The man's heart sinks in his chest as he sees what he's done. He points the gun at the dog one more time, not taking his eyes off the target of the dog's head, but this time adrenaline is his enemy, his hands shaking. He is close but the bullet enters the side of the dog's head, just underneath the ear and out through the back of the head.
Now the dog is making a noise that haunts the man to his core. He walks up to the dog and points the gun right to the side of the dog's head and pulls the trigger. Only a click. He is out of bullets.
He can't morally walk off after increasing the suffering of the dog many times, but he has no gun, no knife, so he's forced to lean over the dog and choke it to death with his own hands. "Am I really going to do this?" thinks the man as he spends a few minutes staring at the dog. He swallows but almost chokes on the lump in his throat. Eventually he leans down. The dog is giving all the fight it can which isn't much. Eventually the dog loses consciousness. Unlike in the movies, to choke something to death you need to keep the blood from flowing to the brain for many minutes. The man was there for 10 minutes choking the poor animal until he was sure the dog's pulse had stopped.
Finally he gets up, starts to walk away and breaks down in tears. He couldn't have imagined this would happened in a thousand lifetimes. His throat feels like he swallowed a rock, the harsh dry heat radiating off the sand, tears evaporating as fast as they hit his skin, leave a salty burning feeling on his face. He is misery.
A couple minutes into him walking further down the path, something catches his ear. He hadn't held on long enough. The whimpers of the dog started as barely audible but he turned around and saw the dog in agony, apparently having a seizure. The lack of blood to the brain didn't manage to kill the dog but damaged it resulting in damage of the dog's nervous system.
The only thing the man could think to do was take a large rock and try to crush the dog's skull. He knew this wasn't going to be a peaceful way for the dog to die but it had to be better than the dog slowly suffering out here in the heat having a perpetual seizure. Perhaps the dog would be knocked unconscious and wouldn't experience the worst of it, the man thought.
He looked around for the biggest rock he could carry. He found one not far from where he was, it was probably 70 or 80 pounds. He walked up to the dog and as he lifted the rock up to do the terrible deed, it slipped from his fingers and landed on the dog's chest.
Dogs aren't as smart as people of course, and dogs know this. But this dog could never understand is why some stranger walking by would stop what he was doing to do something so horrible. Weren't dog and man best friends? At the very end of it's life the dog questioned everything it thought it understood about the relationship between man and dog. Was this how all dog's died? Was the relationship between a man and a dog an elaborate facade to play a terrible joke at the end of their life? What a terrible betrayal. The man picked the rock back up and got a firmer grip this time while laying into the dog's head. It's head was noticeably bashed in and deformed. The shaking from the seizure remained and angry noises came from the dog.
"Why wont this fucking dog die!" he screamed. What had begun as a act of mercy had become a burden on him. Lifting up the rock again and again finally the life drained from the poor dog.
He laughed. It was a laugh of relief. Relief that the dog's suffering was finally over, relief that the his torment was finally over. To the people who had walked up the path behind him and had been recording what appeared, and was, a terrible atrocity done to this dog, the laugh seemed to be a man taking great joy in brutally ending a dog's life.
In court the man pleaded innocent. He was trying to do an act of kindness but the cell phone video told a different story. After seeing the long drawn out brutality of the whole event the judge sentenced the man to full extent of the law. For a few weeks he was the most hated man on the internet, and the other inmates were especially harsh to him. Murdering a man was one thing but someone torturing and murdering a dog belong in a lower level of hell.