I can't say I disagree entirely. It's obviously not a good thing that he did there, but lets not humanize these animals too much. For all intensive purposes he just hunted and killed a duck with his bare hands out of season. The duck probably didn't suffer anymore than if it had been shot, and the only matter complicating it as far as I'm concerned is that someone owned that duck.
Yeah, the guy should be punished, and punished more harshly then if he had just shot a duck out of season, but this isn't anything more cruel (actually probably less so) then animal testing, hunting in general, or the course of nature. There was a story a day or so ago about a guy going around his neighbourhood, taking people's cats (and strays), and feeding them to his pitbulls. That's what laws like this are probably for; whacked and fucked up people doing this thing because it gets them off (or they want to raise dogs that kill).
My main thing here (although I certainly didn't explain my thoughts well) is that you can't have a legal system punish this guy with jail time, yet bring up the fact that the prison system is overcrowded and that it has an effect on sentencing.
