Holy shit. What a prick. It's not like there weren't any shelters, rescues, or animal control services that would have taken the kittens. If he's bred cats in the past he would have known services were readily available. JACKASS!

What fluffy said.

:^(

What fluffy and debora said. The man's an idiot.

He shot the kittens "to spare them from starving to death?"

Is cat food such a big mystery in Minnesota? Jebus.

Nobody has even touched the subject of the guy, being a principal and all, bringing a gun to school and firing it there. I mean, what the hell was he thinking?

What a total arsehole.

Horrible all around. What on Earth was he doing with a gun on school property? Or animal traps on school property? It can't be that backwoods up there.

And what did you do during the war, Mr. Frist?

Don't count on it, redvixen. Indus, MN is a *tiny* town in the middle of a very sparsely populated, densely wooded, 100-some-mile stretch between Baudette and International Falls, right up by the Canadian border. Though I've never lived around there, I've travelled through the area a few times, and it is ... remote, not just geographically but also culturally, at least from our urban perspective. A lot of people up there make a nice (and sorely needed) sideline income from trapping; everyone has guns; folks aren't in general all that sentimental about animals. And although there is an animal shelter in Int'l Falls, nobody may have felt like making an 80-mile round-trip drive through the forest primeval to bring the kittens there, not with gas well over $2 a gallon.

I don't mean to defend this guy at all, because I think what he did was wrong, but I'm pretty sure he was acting out of a sincere desire to do the less cruel thing here. Someone else might have used the time-honored technique of simply drowning them, in which case this story never would have broken on any newswire; it's only due to our current jumpiness about the discharge of firearms on school property that this got the attention of parents, the school district, and the press.