The Question
Or Have You Ever?
When I screened for service in Special Operations, candidates underwent rigorous psychological examinations consisting of a battery of tests and interviews. One of the questions asked was “Have you ever deliberately tortured an animal?”
This was to ascertain one’s empathy, and a positive answer revealed sociopathy as a predictor that kind of behavior would lend to serious acts like war crime violations such as torture. Sure, someone could lie, but any inkling of a positive response immediately washed out the candidate from prospective service.
This leads us to the case of one Cody Roberts, from Daniel, Wyoming, population 108. As a novelist, this case provides a trove of material.
Roberts is alleged to have tortured and killed a wolf in February 2025. He allegedly ran the animal down with a snowmobile (something he’s legally permitted to do under Wyoming law) and taped its mouth shut, then brought it to The Green River Bar as a trophy. After parading it through the town slopchute and torturing it for hours, Roberts took it into the parking lot and shot it dead. Makes for a good and fun night in his part of the world, I suppose.
He’s charged with animal cruelty, pled not guilty at his initial court hearing, and has an arraignment soon, currently scheduled for 28 January 2026. His lawyer has asked the case be tossed since Roberts is legally entitled to do what he wants to an animal “in any manner whatsoever” and therein lies the problem. Roberts believes Wyoming law makes it his right to dispose of an animal however he sees fit. Zero culpability. Zero compunction. I am surmising here, and let’s keep things in perspective that any of Robert’s misdoings are alleged. I said ALLEGED.
Wyoming law permits predators to be hunted, but according to this article Roberts is “charged with tormenting or torturing an animal, he does not stand charged with hunting, capturing, killing or destroying the animal,” Melinkovich [the prosecuting attorney] wrote. “Therefore, there is no ambiguity and the rule of lenity does not apply.”
In a widely circulated screenshot of a video recorded the night of Roberts’s ALLEGED crime, Roberts appears positively proud, gleeful even, as he poses with his quarry. If you examine the wolf, its eyes say everything. It is terrorized and sad, knowing its fate.
The next screenshot is also telling as Roberts appears to lord over the injured wolf.
It was only after public outcry at the barbarism that Wyoming Game and Fish levied Roberts with“a $250 fine for possession of warm-blooded wildlife, later issuing a press release that said animal cruelty laws do not apply to predators.”—Wyomingnews.Com And it took the rest of 2025 to build a case against Roberts because people were afraid to talk, though Roberts’s aunt defended his actions, further calling wolves “evil.”
Evil or not, no animal deserves to die in the manner as is ALLEGED in the court filings.
Oh, and I know you’re innocent until proven guilty and if convicted, you face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000, but regardless of outcome, please, go fuck yourself, Cody.
Then there’s the case—also in Wyoming—of Justin Martin and his son, Range Martin, both of Uinta County, and Kylan Platt of Malad City, Idaho who, in May 2021 ALLEGEDLY chased down a female moose (hardly a predatory animal), roped her, and then rode on her back until she died. They videoed the incident, of course.
Under Wyoming law, the three men are charged with “felony count[s] of cruelty to animals, which carries up to two years imprisonment and/or a fine of $5,000. They were also charged with two misdemeanor counts of wanton taking of a big game animal (a cow moose) which carries a sentence of up to one year and/or $10,000 fine, and possessing live warm-blooded wildlife without a permit, which carries a penalty of up to six months imprisonment and/or $1,000 fine.”—Gillettenewsrecord.com
They’ve also pled not guilty.
America being what it is, someone who reads this column will call me a bleeding heart. Some will tell me to get fucked because I value animals over humans and that laws allow for people to act in this manner. These are the kinds of people who fetishize the latest firearm or knife and will posture loudly about their politics and how “your kind” is the cause of all our problems because I don’t understand what it is to live as they do.
Perhaps, and while I’m pro-hunting for conservation and heard management, I’m firmly against wanton slaughter and animal cruelty. Having fought against the worst predators on earth, I know that human beings are awful, and this in spite of the fact we possess the supposed ability to conduct deductive thinking. This makes the above cases all the more disturbing since the decisions to torture these animals were deliberate. The punishments notwithstanding, I must ask as I did in combat, what the actual fuck is wrong with humanity?!
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I served all over the world in some of the most dangerous places with people specifically screened to work in such environments. That screening process didn’t eliminate all bad apples, certainly, just bought down the risk of hiring more of them. For the most part, however, I trusted the people around me because of the commonality of the screening process—and it was thorough. The rest of the population receives no such analysis so you really never know who’s sitting next to you.
The types of people who’d do this to animals are not people I want to be around, especially in combat, and I wonder how the human race will propagate when those of us who can reason an think and feel guilty for doing bad things are gone and these kinds of shitbirds remain. God help us all.
But back to the original question “Have you ever…?” With guys like Roberts and his ilk, the query is moot because you cannot reason with them. THE FOLLOWING IS A HYPOTHETICAL SCENARIO. If you play out the outcome of a positive answer to the question to its worst conclusion, make no mistake: If you were caught in their small towns, you would disappear without a trace. They’d do it in a heartbeat and without conscience as they go to their taverns to wash down what little humanity they have, but it wouldn’t be with any guilt or remorse for anything they’ve done, cheering your demise in the process with foamy Coors Banquet Beer. It’s their right, remember? Man. Fuck.
All we can hope for is justice and amendments to the types of laws that even make a person consider doing what the aforementioned people in this article are ALLEGED to have committed.
My late friend Eric Erickson was a staunch advocate for wolves and their propagation. He would be aghast at the animal cruelty enumerated in these situations. I miss my friend, but I’m glad he wasn’t around to read this kind of news.
As Eric once said to me:
“Save the wolves.
Save the planet.
Save the excuses.”
Would that it were so. Humanity depends on it.
