VICE's Amsterdam office co-produced Prince, the debut feature film by Dutch writer and director Sam de Jong. This stylish, coming-of-age tale follows a Dutch-Moroccan teen as he cares for his junkie father and falls in with criminals in order to impress the neighborhood girl.

The movie is equal parts authentic and surreal, and uses a cast of non-professional actors to portray life in the streets in contemporary Amsterdam. There's also a killer 80s-style soundtrack. For this five-part VICE Special, we take a behind-the-scenes look at the film's production.

Prince is now in theaters and available to watch now on iTunes and OnDemand.

The flowers of the borrachero tree, which contain scopolamine

Read: How to Get Rid of All the Shit You Put Into Your Body This Summer

Paris police have arrested three people on suspicion of robbing victims while they were in a hypnotic state brought on by the drug scopolamine.

The Telegraph reports that two Chinese women approached people on the street and blew the drug into their faces. Once the victims—who were often elderly—had fallen under the influence of the drug, the two women accompanied them to their homes and asked them to hand over all their valuables. One victim was reportedly robbed of $112,000 worth of stuff.

The pair were finally stopped when a victim identified them in a Metro station, and the police discovered "various Chinese medicinal substances" in the women's hotel room in north east Paris. The third suspect, a 56-year-old man, is thought to have prepared the drug.

Scopolamine—also known as "Devil's Breath"—can be used in very small doses to treat sickness and nausea, but too much brings on drowsiness and hallucinations. It comes from the borrachero tree, native to South America, and is most commonly found in Colombia.

Watch our documentary 'Colombian Devil's Breath,' below:

In our 2013 documentary, VICE's Ryan Duffy called scopolamine "the most dangerous drug in the world," as it is colorless, odorless, and takes effect almost instantly. It robs the users of their free will and often causes amnesia, meaning the victims in Paris may have no recollection of what really happened.

Dr Miriam Gutierrez, a toxicologist, told VICE: "From the medical point of view, it's the perfect substance for criminal acts because the victim won't remember anything and therefore won't report anything." In Colombia, the drug is used by criminals to induce a kind of "zombie" state.

The two suspects in the Paris attack have passports that show recent trips to Mexico, where they could have picked up the drug. It's likely that other members of the gang are still active in Europe, and their profits have already been sent back to China. French police have disclosed the suspects' identities to Chinese authorities, who linked them with a notorious, criminal network that acts around the world and "specializes in mental submission with the aid of unknown products."

Photo by Rogier Alexander

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This is shocking, I know, but people seem to love summer. And why wouldn't they? Summer is the season when it's completely acceptable to walk around semi-naked, get trashed during the day, and/or collect STDs like they're baseball cards. But why is that? Why does a little sunshine get us all hot and bothered? And is all that summertime binge drinking the result of some irreversible biological predisposition? To find out, I got in touch with a psychologist, a sexologist, and a chronobiologist.

Toine Schoutens is trained in psychiatric nursing and is currently the Director of the Dutch Center for Research on Light and Health. Schoutens doesn't think the Vitamin D we get from sun exposure has anything to do with our increased appetite for sex in the summer. "The biological explanation is actually quite simple," he says. "Originally, humans are animals accustomed to living outside and adapting to the alternation between night and day. A few thousand years ago—which isn't that long from an evolutionary point of view—we mainly lived outdoors and our reproductive rhythms were adapted to that. So if you have sex in the summer, a baby follows in spring. Then you'll have an entire warm season to raise it, which makes it easier for the baby to survive the winter."

Roelof Hut, a chronobiologist at the University of Groningen, sees things a little differently. He concedes that many animals have reproductive strategies that depend on the season but that, out of all animals, this applies the least to humans. "Compared to other animals, humans have pretty inferior seasonal rhythm. For example, the Dutch deer only feels like mating in the fall, whereas humans go at it all year long."

Still, that doesn't mean that Schoutens's theory is complete crap. "Our seasonal rhythm may be bad, but we still count on average 20 percent more births throughout the spring months as opposed to the winter months," Hut says. "In the olden days, these differences in birth rates were larger but now that we have so much artificial light, the contrast between the seasons has decreased from a biological point of view."

It would be a relief to know that my summer escapades have more to do with the preservation of my species than just dumb horniness. Unfortunately however, according to Schoutens there also is a psychological explanation: "If the weather is nice, you go outside, get a tan, and generally look a lot better. We also wear significantly less clothing, so others can easily see what kind of meat you're packing. You don't need a masters degree in biology to understand that that triggers our sexual impulses."

Mark Spiering, a psychologist with a specialization in sexology from the University of Amsterdam, agrees. "I think the main reason for our increased sex drive in the summer is simply the amount of nudity we see on the streets. More boobs, more legs, more six-packs," he says.

Watch: Searching for Spitman:

The fact that we are wasted most of the time also helps. As Spiering says, "alcohol clearly causes an increased interest in sex. For men this is mainly because booze increases your testosterone levels, but it works for both sexes. The only problem is that the quality of the actual sex doesn't get better. Having proper orgasms gets a lot harder. Still, our initial sex drive does increase."

Intuitively you could say that sunlight generally improves our mood, and that a good mood increases our desire to do the dirty. Surprisingly enough, Spiering says that this thesis doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny though: "I tested this in the lab once and I found that positive emotions do not necessarily increase your sex drive or your sexual arousal." He adds that "although one could think negative emotions might lead to worse sex, a little bit of fear or stress can actually have beneficial effects for the quality of your intercourse. The assertion that a better mood automatically leads to more frequent or better sex isn't proven."

So there are definite factors that increase the desire to fuck in the summer, but what about the desire to booze it up day and night? For Toine Schoutens, there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between warm weather and the alcohol consumption. "I think those things are largely dependent on the situation and on the drinking culture. The Nordic countries are maybe a good example here. You can translate the midsummer celebrations there as some sort of a hypomanic period where Scandinavians want to do as much as possible to make up for the dark winter months that lie ahead."

Appealing as such an explanation might be, Hut says we don't seem to have a biological disposition towards it: "Humans and fruit flies do share an enzyme, that makes us amazingly good at breaking down alcohol. But that works all year round."

Spiering brought up an insight anyone who's never seen the inside of a school could also come up with: "It gets warmer in the summer, and you tend to get thirsty when it's warm." I guess it's reasonable to assume that our desire to get drunk is owed to the fact that we drink when we have something to celebrate, and there's just more to celebrate in the summer—if only because we're having so much more sex than the rest of the year.

Image via Flickr, Nick Knuppfer

Read: Dissecting the Weirdest Parts of Marc Maron's Interview with President Obama

On Wednesday, Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski announced her support for the treaty with Iran that lifted international sanctions in exchange for limits on Iran's nuclear program. She's the 34th Democrat in the Senate to back the deal, and that magic number means that if Congress passes a resolution disapproving the treaty, President Barack Obama can veto it without fear of it being overridden by a two-thirds majority in Congress.

"No deal is perfect, especially one negotiated with the Iranian regime," wrote Mikulski, according to Roll Call. "I have concluded that this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is the best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb. For these reasons, I will vote in favor of this deal. However, Congress must also reaffirm our commitment to the safety and security of Israel."

Opponents of the deal, including prominent pro-Israel groups and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have objected loudly to the terms of the agreement, claiming that it empowers Iran too much and will lead to the country acquiring a nuclear weapon, either by secretly violating the terms of the agreement or by waiting 15 years, when some provisions of the deal expire. (GOP 2016 candidates have pledged to scrap the deal if elected president.) But despite a fierce campaign over the summer, it appears that the anti-deal contingent has lost the battle.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If his talk of suicide was just a cry for help, the help Michelle Carter gave her boyfriend Conrad Roy III was lethal.

Carter's messages carried the same tone anyone would in trying to nudge a boyfriend dragging his feet to get a job, or go back to school. "There is no way you can fail," she wrote.

But 17-year-old Carter wasn't encouraging her 18-year-old boyfriend to find work. She was goading him into killing himself, prosecutors say.

On July 13, 2014, Roy's body was found in his truck behind a K-Mart in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. The windows were rolled up. He had been running a combustible engine inside and had successfully poisoned himself with carbon monoxide.

When, midway through the endeavor, Roy got out of the truck and called Carter, she told him to finish the job. "Get back in," she said, according to a text message in which she recounted the incident to a friend and lamented his death was her fault.

Though Roy deleted Carter's texts from his phone, per her request, police were able to recover them along with other messages she sent during this period.

On VICE News: Emails Show the FBI and JSOC Discussing an American Blogger Later Killed by the US

Prosecutors at the Bristol County District Attorney's office say Carter's texts are proof that Carter was "engaging in a course of wanton or reckless conduct," and she's being charged with involuntary manslaughter. Though she's being tried in juvenile court, she could face up to 20 years in state prison. Her attorney Joseph Cataldo says her messages are protected under the First Amendment, and he's asking for a judge to throw the case out.

Civil liberties experts are worried about the implications this case may have on freedom of speech, and if saying "go kill yourself" could one day equate to manslaughter. In a state where suicide is not illegal, can you murder someone without ever laying a finger on them? Prosecutors in this case say you can. In an effort to keep the manslaughter charges on the table and the case against Carter moving forward, they've released Roy and Carter's messages in all of their eerie detail.

"Tonight is the night. It's now or never," Carter wrote in one of her many messages to Roy, apparently frustrated that his suicide plan had been all talk and no action, despite her repeated calls to get the job done. "The time is right and you're ready."

Court documents show she had helped him research portable combustion engines online. Take some Benadryl, she told him, and he'd be dead in a half hour. "If you do it right and listen to what that guy said in the article, it will 100 percent work. It's not that hard to mess up," she wrote.

Carter assured Roy that his family would be OK with his death, and that he would enjoy the afterlife. "Everyone will be sad for a while but they will get over it and move on. They won't be in depression. I won't let that happen. They know how sad you are, and they know that you are doing this to be happy and I think they will understand and accept it. They will always carry you in their hearts," she texted him.

"You are my beautiful guardian angel forever and ever. I'll always smile up at you knowing that you aren't far away."

"Aww. Thank you, Michelle," wrote Roy.

Watch: Guns in the Sun

Carter and Roy met a few years earlier when they were both visiting family in the same town in Florida, Roy's family told the Boston Globe. Though the teenagers came from different towns in Massachusetts, they only met in person a couple of times. The rest of their relationship was carried out over phone calls and texts.

Roy tried to kill himself before, by swallowing acetaminophen—the painkiller found in Tylenol—Cataldo said in a hearing last week. In the month before Roy's death, Carter was treated at McLean Hospital for mental health issues. Cataldo says his client encouraged Roy to receive mental health treatment, too.

In fact, the defense argues that Roy wanted the couple to pull a double-suicide, Romeo and Juliet–style. Carter wasn't having it. "This was a young man who wanted to kill himself, and previously tried to kill himself, and now he is trying to get a juvenile to get her to kill herself with him," Cataldo told VICE.

Prosecutor Owen Murphy wrote in a motion that Conrad's command for Roy to get back into his truck and submit himself to carbon monoxide poisoning was not mere speech but a "verbal act instrumental in the commission of manslaughter." Her language is akin to threats, which are not protected by the First Amendment, he wrote.

In her messages, Carter told Roy that if he didn't follow through with his macabre plan, she would get him mental health care, an option Roy seemed to have given up on. "You just need to do it, Conrad, or I'm gonna get you help," she wrote.

When he didn't follow through, Carter teased him. "I bet you're gonna be like 'Oh, it didn't work because I didn't tape the tube right or something like that.' I bet you're gonna say an excuse like that... you seem to always have an excuse."

The 40-page unsealed indictment reveals how in the week before his death, Carter was insistent that he off himself, encouraging him to look elsewhere when he couldn't get the supplies he needed.

"Do you have the generator?" Carter asked.

"Not yet LOL," responded Roy.

"WELL WHEN ARE YOU GETTING IT?," Carter demanded.

"Now." he replied.

When the plan started to materialize, Carter worried that he might stall.

"You can't think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don't get why you aren't," she wrote in a message.

"I don't get it either. I don't know," wrote Roy.

"So I guess you aren't gonna do it then," wrote Carter. "All that for nothing. I'm just confused. Like you were so ready and determined."

"I am gonna eventually. I really don't know what I'm waiting for but I have everything lined up," Roy wrote back.

"No, you're not, Conrad. Last night was it. You keep pushing it off and you say you'll do it, but you never do. It's always gonna be that way if you don't take action," she scolded.

Carter worried Roy might chicken out. "You better not be bullshitting me and saying you gonna do this and then purposely get caught."

"No, none of that," Roy assured her.

Cataldo maintains Carter was simply exercising her freedom of speech and that her words do not add up to a manslaughter charge. Her messages may be disturbing, but they are not criminal, he says.

"If you find it repugnant that's fine," says Cataldo.

Carter wouldn't be the first person convicted of orchestrating a suicide remotely. William F. Melchert-Dinkel was a Minnesota nurse who, under various female aliases, enjoyed encouraging people to live-stream their own hangings, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2011 Melchert-Dinkel was found guilty of two counts under a Minnesota law that said it was illegal to "advise" or "encourage" suicide.

But those charges were overturned when, in the first half of 2014, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that criminalizing "advising" or "encouraging" suicide violated the First Amendment. Later that year he was tried again, and convicted of "assisting" a suicide, a law that is still on the books in that state.

Massachusetts, on the other hand, is one of those rare states where assisting suicide is not illegal. Forty states have assisted-suicide laws on the books but the Bay State is not oneof them. Encouraging suicide is not a crime either, according to Cataldo.

That's why the state is charging Carter with involuntary manslaughter, instead. Prosecutors at the Bristol District Attorney's office say people have been convicted of similar crimes in the past, including one case in 1961 where after telling her he was going to file for divorce, Ilario Persampieri handed his drunken wife a loaded rifle and instructed her on how to pull the trigger with her feet. While she was taking off her right shoe, the rifle discharged and she died the next day. Persampieri was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

But some legal experts say that whether or not Carter's case goes to trial, the prosecution may have a difficult time drawing parallels between Roy's suicide and the death of Persampieri's wife. Persampieri handed his wife a loaded gun, but there was no physical exchange between Carter and Roy. Matthew Segal, legal director of the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU, says the lack of "physical assistance" could make this a tricky case for the prosecution to try.

The larger implications of this case—that someone's language could land them with a homicide charge—is troubling to Segal, too. "If saying, 'Go kill yourself,' could get you locked up, then there would be no radio talk show hosts left," he tells me.

"There is no question that someone would have a First Amendment right to say that they think more people should commit suicide," Segal adds. But he believes the prosecution may be able build their case around the fact that Carter targeted Roy, specifically.

The prosecution, it should be noted, is arguing that Carter had something to gain from Roy's death: attention. She did not disclose her conversations with Roy to his family, and instead texted them on the night of his death, wondering if they knew where he might be. According to prosecutors, she soaked up sympathy from her friends, and held a suicide awareness fundraiser that served more as an excuse to throw a party than to benefit Roy's family or other victims.

Carter's messages seem to hint at another motivation, too. But was she really expecting Roy to be her guardian angel after this?

"He told me he would give me signs to know he was watching over me," she wrote to a friend on September 15, 2014, more than a month after his death. "I haven't seen any."

Follow Susan Zalkind on Twitter.

Pope Francis. Photo via Flickr user Aleteia Image Partners

I had my first confession when I was eight years old.

In the wacky world of Catholicism, Grade 2 is the magical period when we all turn into full-blown sinners and need to apologize for the terrible shit we've done to secure a place in heaven.

The thought of reciting all my misdeeds to a priest made me anxious. Not, as you might mistakenly guess, because it's really fucking weird for a small child to have to tell a stranger all the things they feel bad about. No. I was just worried I would be scolded if my sins didn't measure up, or if there weren't enough of them. So I would sit down and compile a lengthy list of ways I had broken the 10 Commandments. One time in the confessional box, just as I was reading aloud "didn't share my cookies at recess"—the halfway mark on my list—the priest interrupted me with a brusque "It's fine. Do ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys." I felt a rush knowing that my soul would be restored to its original state of purity.

In my teenage years, I stopped caring. I attended an all-girls Catholic school so rigid that one couldn't help but rebel. And I found myself resentful of a religion that relied heavily on a culture of guilt. IMO, some of the Catholic church's greatest taboos—divorce, being gay, having an abortion—are none of its goddamned business.

But on those three fronts, the newest pope, Francis, has played the role of shit disturber with his relatively liberal views. He most recently caused a stir on Tuesday, when he announced that in the upcoming "Year of Mercy" all priests are free to absolve the "sin of abortion."

Women who want to be forgiven for having an abortion—a sin considered worthy of excommunication—would normally have to meet with a bishop and undergo a fairly rigorous process. Basically, the pope is saying any Joe Blow in a Roman collar can now do the job.

"The forgiveness of God cannot be denied to one who has repented, especially when that person approaches the Sacrament of Confession with a sincere heart," Pope Francis wrote in a letter to the Vatican, adding he's spoken to many women who "bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision."

If, like me, you find it patronizing and backward that a woman would have to seek out some old dude (and yes, priests are still all dudes) to be absolved for a decision she made about her body—one that requires no atonement—you might feel righteous indignation.

"I'm sorry, why should we be happy about #PopeFrancis 'forgiving' us for an abortion? Because no. We don't need forgiveness," tweeted Kathleen Pye, a self-described feminist activist who works for LGBT organization Egale Canada.

But the reality is less black and white than that.

Abortion is still illegal in many parts of the world, resulting in an estimated 21 million women seeking out clandestine procedures every year. Only one in six hospitals in Canada performs abortions. So Pope Francis' declaration, while incredibly paternalistic, addresses a stigma that is still very much prevalent today.

"That stigma results in tremendous barriers to access to abortion services in Canada and globally," Sandeep Prasad, executive director of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, told VICE.

"The pope has taken a step in the right direction but there are many more steps to be taken to ensure that unsafe abortion is a thing of the distant past."

Change happens slowly.

Women who still crave that sense of relief I felt as a child going to confession shouldn't be denied it. Nor should they be judged for seeking it out, or for anything else.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

'Devil's Third', then: a load of ass

This is terrific. Glossy haired and perma-shaded Japanese designer Tomonobu Itagaki, the man who once brought the Ninja Gaiden franchise back from the grave and gave gamers a whole new appreciation of breast physics with his Dead or Alive fighting (and, um, volleyball) series, still won't let it lie that nobody likes his newest game, the Wii U-only Devil's Third. (Which I wrote about over here, back in July.)

The melee-combat-mixed-with-shooting action affair, riddled with glitches, cornball dialogue, countless awful clichés and gameplay so tired it's practically in a coma, came out last week and completely missed the UK top 40. In Wii U-exclusive sales terms, it could only sell enough copies (in the middle hundreds, I'm told) to reach number eight, one place higher than FIFA 13. Again, that's FIFA 13. People are genuinely still buying new copies of FIFA 13. I no longer know what the real story here is, either.

Anyway, reviews have been kind enough to give it an average score, a Metascore, of 42 (out of 100). I've played a healthy chunk of it, under no duress from anyone because I am clearly an idiot, in the comfort of my own home; and I really must stress, if it wasn't already quite clear enough: This is a very bad video game. It's suffered from engine moves and various delays, and bless Nintendo, truly, for stepping up to publish it when it'd been abandoned by prior suitors, but really: It's completely crap. Nobody has enough time in their lives to waste on games like this when so many good things are out now, and imminently.

Itagaki has taken this very personally. When the first (p)reviews were coming out, universally negative, he suggested that those writing the pieces in question simply weren't any good at the game. He claimed that the Wii U's GamePad, which comes with the console, wasn't the right controller to use—it was better to spend another $60+, on top of the cost of the game, to pick up a Pro Controller and USB keyboard. His deluded perspective on his creation—understandable, to some degree, of course—extended to calling Devil's Third a "breakthrough" for the games industry, and that it was going to take shooters "to the next level." Of shit, ultimately, but I'm certain that's not what the man was implying.

New on Motherboard: Jimmy Kimmel Is Battling Gamers for Most Clichés Dropped in One Week

And now Itagaki has turned on the very procedure of how the gaming press tackles new titles, reports MCV. "I'm going to guess that most people reviewing the game weren't given a chance to evaluate it properly," he posted on Facebook. "We designed the online multiplayer to be enjoyed with tons of people, but it seems dozens of reviewers were only allowed to try the game in a closed environment. As you can imagine, no one can effectively evaluate the playability of multiplayer games under these conditions."

Except, actually, of course they can. Now that Devil's Third is out, at retail, owners can indeed enjoy its multiplayer element in the company of literally tens of other players. It doesn't change a thing, and while reviewers did experience the mode under certain restrictive conditions, the gameplay remains the same. This is a tremendously dated shooter whose multiplayer component, while undeniably more fun than its solo campaign, is still extremely flawed. Weapons clip through the environment, revealing your position to opponents, and it features microtransactions, FFS.

Before its release, there was the most slender of suggestions that Devil's Third, having overcome so many unfortunate setbacks to even come out, could become something of a cult hit on a system seriously lacking titles that aren't Mario-related in some way. That it might be a fun, but disposable, flashback to macho shooters of yesteryear, steered by a past master of the action genre. But it's not. Really, it's not, and if anyone's telling you otherwise, ignore such gibberish. Want an online shooter for your Wii U? Get Splatoon. Want a broken game that still has a certain, I don't know, nostalgic charm to it? Get Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Okay, don't get that. Just don't buy shit games, yeah?

Smoke drifts over the Metropolitan Remand Centre in Melbourne. Photo by Dan Nulley

Two months after a $20 million riot at a prison in Melbourne's west, former Australia attorney general John Dowd has warned prisons in New South Wales are at a similar breaking point. As he pointed out, the state's justice system is overcrowded, under resourced, and about to introduce a smoking ban—which was the defining catalyst for Melbourne's riot.

What's interesting is these are recognized risk factors, which raises the question: how do riots start? Do prisoners plan them, or do they break out spontaneously? To find out we asked an expert in Australian prisons from Adelaide University, Dr. Elizabeth Grant, who advises corrections departments around the country on prison saftey through design.

VICE: Hi, Elizabeth. How do riots start?
Dr. Elizabeth Grant: They're usually spontaneous. The prisoners might just be playing eight ball, for example, and then something happens and they refuse to go back in the cell. Then someone will say something like if you make me, I'll hit you. It doesn't take much, and the prison officers aren't going to walk into the scenario, they're going to back out. That's the first rule: your own safety first because, in the end, prisoners have nowhere to go and sooner or later they'll run out of food.

So why riot then?
Environmental psychology says this is what you do when you lose control: you try to change your circumstances. Prisoners will protest, either singularly or as part of a group. They're trying to get back control of their environment and themselves. The worst outcome is they'll actually try to end their own lives, which is a form of regaining control of their environment.

When is a prison most at risk of getting into a riot?
Every time there's change of circumstances, it's a risky time. It could be a high profile prisoner being brought in, a change of policy, or a new prison being built. Every new prison has new rules—prisoners know the rules and don't want something new.

Then the other issue is putting different groups together. There're some groups of prisoners who you just don't put together, and I mean, you really don't put them together. They always fight.

Which groups are those?
Gangs, obviously. Biker gangs, street gangs, and certain cultural groups, too. When a prisoner first goes in, they're asked if they're affiliated with a gang or a street crew or whatever, in an attempt to figure out where they should be housed. There's two ways of thinking about this: you either put all the gangs in together—which risks them taking over the prison—or you try to keep them separated. Whether you're concentrating or dispersing, it's always an issue.

Can't prison wardens just clamp down on problem inmates?
No, because when officers used to deal out violence it caused a lot of problems. The 70s and 80s were apparently bad for riots. Take Bathurst [the scene of a notorious riot in 1974] for example. It was an extreme environment. They would give each prisoner that came into Bathurst a beating as a warning—a really severe beating, I mean to within an inch of their lives—and they did this for 12 years. So the prisoners ended up rebelling with a riot. It was a huge riot; they burned the place down. Bathurst was the turning point for Australian prisons. Most modern prisons were built after Bathurst.

Overcrowding is often cited as a major factor. Do you believe it's significant?
Well it is and it isn't. Overcrowding squashes people together and stretches resources, but what's more significant is boredom. If prisoners are busy they're less likely to riot. But there's very little entertainment in prison except for television. You're locked down at four o'clock, your meal comes at about 4:30 PM and that's it until seven the next morning. It's mind-blowingly dull.

You said that prison riots used to be a lot worse. What's changed, aside from less beatings?
There's a thing called unit management in pretty much all prisons now. You'll have a smaller group of prisoners and you have a unit manager who case manages prisoners. If you case manage prisoners, and you're doing it well, you don't get riots. You just don't see the riots you had in the 70s anymore, and that's because of unit management. There used to be these huge riots, they'd go for days, and people died. They were quite extraordinary events. That was before we had unit management. And the ones we have now are nothing by comparison.

So how can riots be avoided?
Good communication is key. Prisoners need to be given information but not control; they need to feel secure and safe in their environment, or they will riot. That's the first question I'd ask after something goes wrong: were the prisoners secure and safe? There's nothing in it for prisoners. If they riot they're only going to get punished and as you pointed out, they've got nowhere to go.

Follow Max on Twitter

There is trash absolutely everywhere and the smell of bodily fluids is ripe in the heat. Used diapers, empty chip bags, and scrunched up cans of Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and fruit juice cartons litter the ground. Even with a brisk breeze, it's uncomfortably hot in the midday sun. Groups of people—mostly young men—crouch in the shade of olive trees, talking among themselves.

A woman standing under a shower head laughs and lathers a young boy's hair with shampoo while he giggles. More small children play as a man and a woman bicker quietly in a tent.

Laundry hangs from every spare bit of barbed wire fence, an immaculate pair of green-and-blue Nike Roshes dry on a rock in the sun.

I'm at an emergency migrant and refugee camp in Kara Tepe, just five minutes' drive from Mytilene, the main city on the Greek island of Lesvos. It is currently home to 3,000 displaced people, run by the International Rescue Committee, and there's barely enough space for those who've been lucky enough to arrive safely on the island. Two-thirds of all refugees to Greece land on Lesvos, and their time here is just one stage of their long, arduous journey to sanctuary in mainland Europe.

The average stay for residents here is three days. It's just long enough to wash, get papers in order, and try to find a ticket out.

Throughout the day and night, small motor-powered RIB boats land on the shores of Lesvos. The passengers leap out, kiss the ground, hug their families, take victorious selfies, and quickly leave the scene.

It's hard to stress how common an occurrence this is. The camp's population—around 3,000 people—arrive on the island every single day. The population of Lesvos is estimated at a little over 86,000. Within just two months this summer, nine times the population of the island has passed through. The International Rescue Committee says that 85 percent of everyone coming to Greece—including the hordes of families on package holidays to Corfu and 17-year-olds getting wrecked in Malia—is a refugee.

A few years ago, men had started leaving Syria to tentatively find new lives for their families in Europe. Now, as the situation in their home country becomes more desperate, their families have come to join them. 80 percent of the refugees to Greece are Syrian, and there's been a recent spike in the numbers of women and children.

All photos International Rescue Committee

I approach a group of young men to ask about life in the camp. The four men, aged 25 to 38, decline to give their first names and refuse photographs in case they're identified. They left Syria 15 days ago, and have spent a week in the camp, waiting for their ferry booked for the next day. They all want to go to Germany.

When asked what the conditions are like in the camp, one guy smiles wryly: "Not bad."

Another cuts in: "The place is not very good to stay here—but we don't have any choice. There isn't any [space in the] hotels or any room to stay—and here we have no bath, no WC. Well, there is bath but it's very, very dirty and the WC is very bad. But we're booked on the big ship for Tuesday, so we're just waiting until we can go."

"We thought we'd be here for one day or two days, but one week..." He sighs. "It's very long."

Another says: "This is the first time we have slept outside a house, or in a tent, or in a street. It's very strange."

The group traveled from Aleppo on a journey they all describe as "very difficult." One man says: "It's a very small boat we took to come here—it's maybe nine meters long and there were 50 people in it. The journey is one hour and 20 minutes. It's not such a long time but when you feel [the situation is so] dangerous, the distance is very long.

"We stopped in the sea for 30 minutes and he [gestures to one of his friends] fixed the motor—he is a mechanical engineer—and then we got to the beach. We were very happy."

Related: Watch VICE News' documentary 'Death Boats to Greece' (Part One)

The men mostly want to go to Germany to study before finding work. They're all middle class, well educated and had good jobs in Syria. One tells me: "I am a pharmacist. I graduated last year and I want to get a Masters and a doctorate in Germany. I worked in a pharmacy in Syria but they wanted to get me to the army." There's a chorus of "yes" from the other men. "So I had to get out of Syria."

Is the same true of most men in the camps? He gestures round: "All! Most of the people."

All the men I speak to say they intend to go home one day. "When I have finished my studying and working, we will go back."

What would have to have changed to make them go back? "Every system! Everything. Everything is built on a false[hood]. Nothing is right in Syria now. We will change everything if we can."

It's a big task to start a new life somewhere strange. Is it scary? "No. It's not scary. It's like an adventure," one man says.

The journey to Germany certainly sounds scary. The guys I speak to reckon it'll cost them at least 3,000 Euros to travel up to the Greek mainland, across to Macedonia, through Serbia, Hungary, and Austria before finally reaching Germany. It's been nicknamed "the Black Trail" as it's such a dangerous route. Experts from the International Rescue Committee (or IRC) have heard stories of people being robbed at gunpoint in Serbia and beaten unconscious by Hungarian police.

IRC workers say they have—in total—only met one refugee who wants to go to Britain out of the tens of thousands who have passed through.

For people who are unable to leave the camp just yet, there are more mundane hardships to face. As the stench in the camp suggests, there are major problems with sanitation. It's impossible to cater for so many people at such short notice, and every time an advance is made, more people arrive and access to resources such as toilets is stretched even further. Plus there are problems you couldn't predict. Take this as an example: installing metal shower stalls means that some people, mostly women, have started shitting in the showers.

"They will often have come from closed communities and will normally have lots of close female friends and family surrounding them, so going to the camp toilets alone can be frightening," explains Kirk Day, the IRC's Emergency Field Director on Lesvos. "But now they're in a mixed-gender environment where they don't know anybody and they feel threatened. This means the volunteers now have to clear the shit from the shower cubicles."

Until recently, Lesvos was most famous for local poet Sappho and a group of fanatics who started a legal challenge against people who used the word "lesbian" to describe gay women.

Now, it's become known for coping with a humanitarian crisis despite threadbare local resources and a financial crisis. "The attitude is very much that it's Greece's problem in the international community but that's unfair," Day says. "Do you know how many working ambulances Lesvos has? Two! The refugee crisis has been going on under the radar for a few years, but it's now reached this stage, and locals are thinking: I've given away everything I can to help and it's starting to look like this is never going to be fixed."

"Last week alone, more refugees came than they did during the whole of 2014. Can you think of any other country in the world that would see this happening during a financial crisis and react with such generosity?"

It's hard to disagree. The number of refugees arriving each day on the island is the same as the total number of refugees in Calais trying to get to Britain. Compare the relatively easy Greek reaction to having thousands of people pitch up on a small island to the foaming-at-the-mouth fury of some Brits—whether that be the moronic Britain First members who drove to Calais to try to stop the influx single-handedly, or the politicians and media outlets currently working hard to demonize some of the most desperate people on Earth.

In the city, the stalls of food shops offer necessities, such as bread and canned fish, accompanied by signs in Arabic. Land has also been donated to the refugees by the mayor and local volunteers are very keen to help.

But conspiracy theories still abound. Some people I speak to don't like that the refugees are Muslim. Some are wary of the fact that the people coming over are from Turkey and believe it's a kind of Ottoman invasion. Others remark that the refugees are dirty people.

There have also been reports of knife fights and stabbings by the port as people fight to get on the ferries, although the IRC says there have been some false stories.

A healthy refugee economy has also boomed, with some local businesses doing roaring trades thanks to the new influx of customers. A fast-food stall on the waterfront is getting plenty of customers. The IRC says one local came to the camp and allowed refugees to charge their phones from his van. He claimed he was letting them do it for free, but refugees said he was secretly charging one Euro a go.

When I enter the camp one sweaty day in August, I am greeted by the sight of two women in bright red Vodafone T-shirts selling SIM cards to an eager cluster of men. They're not really from the phone company, just chancers taking advantage of the situation.

While the local efforts have been encouraging, the international community's failure to help refugees can be likened to 1930s attitudes toward Jewish émigrés, Day argues.

"Knowing what we know now about the Nazis in Germany, I think everybody would agree they think more should have been done to help. You can compare that situation to what ISIS is doing now," he says.

Is there a racial element at play? "It's worth asking: if the refugees were a different color and had a different religion, would people do more to help?"

"One young refugee showed us what he had in his small rucksack—and two of the items were skin whitener and hair gel. He said he didn't want to look like a refugee, and if he was sleeping rough, his hair might not look tidy and it would be a giveaway that he was homeless."

"Nothing will be as miserable as the life we lived in Syria," the pharmacist tells me. "Here, it's fair and free from racists."

As he follows the Black Trail, I hope this remains true.

Follow Helen Nianias on Twitter.

Photos by Jake Lewis for VICE

VICE spent last night with campaigners from the environmental campaign group Greenpeace as they pulled off their latest stunt in central London.

After months of lobbying to keep the oil and gas company Shell from drilling in the Arctic, having intercepted ships and dangled themselves off bridges, campaigners today transported a polar bear puppet the size of a double-decker bus to Shell's offices on the South Bank. They intend for the bear—named "Aurora"—to remain fixed there until Shell's Arctic drilling window ends later this month. Six protesters are inside the puppet, locked to it in a way they hope will prevent it being removed.

Last month, President Obama granted the final permits needed for Shell to get going with their plans for Arctic oil drilling, allowing them to bore into hydrocarbon layers in the sea bed. They have just weeks left to strike oil, with their window to find the liquid closing on September 28. There are billions of dollars on the line; the company has already spent a reported $6 billion on Arctic oil exploration, and is preparing to sink a further $1 billion into it this year.

The bear outside Shell's HQ just off the South Bank in central London

Shell says drilling for oil in the Arctic is "essential to securing energy supplies for the future" but at 6 AM this morning, 60 or so Greenpeace activists attempted to remind the company that they're not going away. Earlier this year, researchers concluded that Arctic drilling is incompatible with the goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

"Arctic drilling is a threat to the Arctic and a threat to millions of people living on the frontline of climate change," argues Greenpeace Arctic campaigner Elena Polisano. "Shell is ignoring all this in blind pursuit of profit. Shell says we don't want to have a debate with them about the world's energy needs, but we've asked them several times to meet and they've refused."

The Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson, pictured above, also joined the protest, helping the activists lock on to the bear. She will also be making a speech to the press.

"Last year I went to the Arctic and saw the melting of that place for myself," Thompson told VICE this morning. "It lit a torch inside me that won't go out until we protect it in the same way as the Antarctic is at the moment. It made it clear that drilling for oil there would be a suicidal move.

"That's why I've come to their HQ," she continued. "I'm here to say 'no'. I'm here to say 'this has to end.' I'm one of millions of people demanding that this company pulls out of the Arctic."

The six activists who've locked themselves to the polar bear structure say they won't be leaving until Shell promises to halt their drilling activities, or they're dragged out by the cops. Barry Broadly, 48, is one of those inside: "Once we're in place we have to give Shell the feeling that we'll be there for the duration, we have to show our commitment. We'll be staying until the drilling stops, so the ball is in their court. It's your move now, Shell."

VICE has been granted firsthand access to the action, with journalists embedded on the team overnight at their base camp outside the city. We'll be watching as Shell reacts to the action, and the activists locked inside deal with the pressures of the protest and negotiate with police.

Follow Mike Segalov and Jake Lewis on Twitter.

Gun-toting activists, revolutionaries, community leaders, criminals—the Black Panther Party and its members have been called many things over the years. But in the new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, filmmaker Stanley Nelson attempts to present a unified portrait of the group, in the process capturing how the same issues that spurred the Black Panthers to organize 50 years ago are still relevant today: police brutality, a skewed justice system, outright racism, and draconian prison sentences.

The film takes us through the rise and the fall of the BPP and covers the 1966–1973 time period. That era saw riots rock the inner cities, the Vietnam conflict rage, and the Civil Rights movement in full effect. The Black Panthers demanded equality, at the point of a gun if need be, but they were branded as criminals for their efforts. They walked the streets of California openly armed like a militia, and monitored law enforcement as they went about their lives. The world was in shock at the group's brazen attitude, a mentality that hip-hop later embraced in its own way later.

The Panthers' militant stance made them easy targets for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and the Bureau's secret counter-intelligence program, COINTELPRO. With the feds hounding them at every step, leveling indictments and putting their key members in prison, the BPP faced tremendous obstacles as they fought to provide food and other social services to their communities. Informants infiltrated their ranks at an alarming rate on the FBI's behalf, dooming the original Black Panther Party even if it spawned successor movements that remain active in America.

VICE got with director Stanley Nelson to get his thoughts on the Black Panther Party back then and what it means today.

VICE: When did you first hear about the Black Panther Party?
Stanley Nelson: I was 15 and living in New York City when the Panthers came into being, and like so many people I was really moved by the Panthers, by everything about them. The way they dressed—they looked so cool. They were very attractive to the young people from the cities. I think the Panthers changed the way that a lot of African Americans saw themselves and their role. Up until this time we did not see black people confront white people and put our finger in their face and say, "Fuck you, I'm gonna do what I need to do." We didn't see that.

A group of seven small children walk to school with books in hand. Photo courtesy of Stephen Shames

What influenced the Black Panther Party to start advocating for change in their communities?
I think the Panthers were influenced by what was happening in Latin America. They were influenced by the traditional Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King. They saw what was working and what didn't work. The Civil Rights movement, part of the traditional Civil Rights movement, was a very kind of polite way of being: We're going to show you that we are better than this white mob in Mississippi. We're going to show you that we're better and then you have to choose a side.

I think the Panthers said, We know that a certain number of people are going to be alienated by the way we look, by the way we act, by our aggressiveness, by our confrontations. We know that a certain number of people both white and black are going to be alienated by this, but there's also going to be a number of people that are going to gravitate to us when they see that, and those are the people that we want. That's where the Panthers were coming from.

When did they start attracting the attention of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover?
It was very early on. By the time they invaded the Sacramento courthouse, the attention of J. Edgar Hoover was there. J. Edgar Hoover said that the breakfast for children's program was the most dangerous thing that the Panthers were doing, [and he] had a problem with black people and he had that problem from way back. He wanted to keep the status quo. He felt like that was his job, to have no change in the country. To have black men with guns and on the nightly news talking about radical change in this country was naturally something that would attract J. Edgar Hoover's attention. His belief was that it had to be destroyed.

Should the Black Panthers be classified as criminals?
I think that I would have to say that there were criminal elements in the Panthers. By and large, they weren't criminal in their philosophy, but there were some criminal elements. There were some people that had been and were criminals. There are incidents that are documented of the Panthers hijacking a bread truck, and it probably wasn't a sanctioned action, but these were Panthers who did this and they did [other] things that they shouldn't have done.

What about their leaders—Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and Fred Hampton?
Their time in the Black Panther Party, they were much more activists than criminals. Especially the time that we covered in the film, '66-'73. Cleaver had engaged in some criminal activities before that, the same with Bobby and Huey... and Fred Hampton was just murdered. By and large at that point, in those years, they were activists.

Black Panthers from Sacramento at a Free Huey Rally in Bobby Hutton Memorial Park in Oakland in 1969. Photo courtesy of Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch

How did the Feds infiltrate the Black Panther Party?
They didn't have a lot of screening processes on who joined, and they were riddled with informers. An informer and an infiltrator—those are very strange individuals. Some people did it for money. A lot of times they join because they want to feel important, like they are part of law enforcement—the excitement of living a dual life. A lot of them are not well balanced human beings to do that kind of thing. What was essential was that the Panthers didn't have the screening process that was going to weed you out. There was no way that they were going to weed you out and nobody understood that this was being done to the extent that it was being done. They understand that there might be infiltrators, but they didn't know to what extent the FBI might go.

What impact did the Black Panthers have on hip-hop?
We would never have hip-hop without the Black Panthers. That's why so much of hip-hop is fascinated with the Panthers. It's the whole attitude that you couldn't have without the Panthers, and that's essential. You can't mention that time period without mentioning the war in Vietnam. A lot of the Panthers were veterans and were used to carrying guns, and there was this feeling that if you were going to die in Vietnam, maybe you better push for change here in the United States. One of the things we tried to do in the film viscerally was make you feel that this was a different time, that this was a revolutionary time, but also a very positive time. We tried to give you that look, and the music—not only have people talk about those times but try to take you back there.

What is the Black Panthers' legacy?
Hopefully the legacy is, what we want people to take away from this, is that these were young people who felt that they could make a change. By and large, they were young people who wanted to change things for African Americans and for this country. They made mistakes. Was everything they did right? No way. But in general, the rank and file joined the Panthers because they wanted to make change. These were young people who were able to create a movement that we are talking about 50 years later. They saw that they could be instruments of change. Take away the positive from it, you can make change and learn from the successes and the failures of the Panther movement.

Older woman wearing flower dresses with bags from People's Free Food Program, one of the Panthers' survival programs.

How do the issues the Black Panthers were fighting against still affect the African American community today?
The issues that the Black Panther Party were fighting against are still very prevalent today. If you look at the ten-point program—We want to end police brutality; we want decent schools; we want decent housing; we want employment; we want to end these crazy prison terms for black people—all of these things are as relevant today as they were back then.

And they're relevant today because they never got solved. It's not like these issues are turning up again—they were never solved. It's my contention that we've had police brutality for the last 50 years and before that. The only thing is now we're seeing it filmed on camera. And there's no denying it. One of the most amazing things about making this film and getting it out there is how relevant it is today.

The film premieres on Wednesday.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

The video above depicts a shitty thing that hit the internet this week. For whatever reason, a lady is arguing with some other ladies in the street. When things get heated, she turns her very small dog on a leash into a mace-and-chain (or a "flail"), and swings it at one of her adversaries. If fashioning a weapon from your dog weren't a monstrous thing to do, I'd say the the blow connects nicely, and the second woman is kept at bay. Instead, I'll say the dog in the video is potentially injured in a collision with a woman's shoulder and face (Worth noting: The dog's suffering appears to continue as the woman hurries away with the dog in a painful-looking dangling position).

Normally this is not the kind of thing that really needs extra coverage on our respectable website, but this showed up twice in the media last week. In addition to the dog-leash-swinger above, there was a guy in Kansas who weaponized his dog in almost the exact same way, though not as effectively: He swung his Pekingese at a cop, who then tasered and arrested him. Park City, Kansas Police Chief Phil Bostain, told the local NBC news affiliate, "Everyone sees this little dog that's defenseless. This dog's not here by its own choice, and it's used as a weapon. It's disturbing."

It's a bit ironic that a police officer would complain about a dog being "used as a weapon," when over the decades police have weaponized dogs too, famously using them to squelch protests during the Civil Rights Movement. But let's not be so dense as to miss his point. Yes, animals have been used in war, law enforcement and hunting since the dawn of humanity, but typically those animals are agents in their own weaponization. You can argue whether or not police dogs consent to become weapons—a worthy argument for another time. But what's even disturbing to a cop is when animals are used as blunt instruments or ammunition. Although finding ways to take advantage of animals' aggressive behaviors has served humans well over the years, using them as unwitting bullets, bombs and bludgeons has been prevalent throughout human history too.

Animal Missiles

Less scary combination of pig and fire. Via Wikimedia Commons user Jbarta

Sure, millions of animals have charged into battle with soldiers on their backs through the millennia. It must be terrifying to be a horse when the battle doesn't go well, and it can only be annoying at best when the asshole on your back is winning. But throughout most of history—and maybe still today—people have used animals the way modern belligerents might use missiles and bombs.

Pliny the Elder described what is perhaps the first instance of incendiary animals: Pigs. In Pliny the Elder's account it sounds as though they were just unleashed to scare war elephants. Supposedly once scared, Elephants "fall back, and become no less formidable for the destruction which they deal to their own side, than to their opponents." That puts pigs in that semi-willing participant category, along with war elephants and, for that matter, horses. But some historians think war pigs were set on fire, making them less like sentient fighter jets, and more like sentient kamikaze planes.

For a different kind of weaponized animals, check out our documentary 'Beasts of Burden'

There's actually substantial evidence that one of Alexander the Great's generals Antigonus was so severely plagued by the popular flaming pig strategy that he forced his war elephants to mingle with pigs full time so that they wouldn't be afraid of pigs—flaming or otherwise. Over a thousand years later, a very similar strategy was employed by the Tuko-Mongol Genghis Khan imitator Timur who used flaming camels against Elephants in India.

As the centuries wore on and battle situations became more prickly and complicated, so did biological warfare. Early examples include the maritime strategy practiced by Hannibal, Carthage's legendary wartime tactician, in 190 BC-ish of throwing poisonous snakes into enemy ships —although deadly snakebites were the theoretical lethal payload, not just the sheer force of a snake smacking into a sailor. Centuries later in the middle ages, Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise was known for lobbing scorpion bombs, with a strategy similar to that of Hannibal and his snakes.

Not long after those scorpion bombs were used, a great example of an unwittingly weaponized animal materialized on the other side of the world in China: flaming monkeys. Monkeys were essentially used the way the US military used napalm in Vietnam. When Yanzhou rebels tried to take on the newly-minted Song Dynasty around the early 12th Century, the Imperial army lit monkeys on fire, and unleashed them in the Yanzhou rebel camp. Non-flaming monkeys aren't exactly known for keeping their shit together, so flaming monkeys sound pretty terrifying.

Modern Warfare

Dog with a package that presumably isn't wired to explode. Via Flickr user F. Pat Murray

More recent developments in war, like bombs that don't explode until they hit their target, and missiles that can be aimed, have made military strategists greedy about what kind of results they should expect from their animal weapons. That's been good in some ways, because a lot of unwitting animal weapons have been aborted when they were still in the research phase. And it's also resulted in some really depressing weapons.

In the 1930s, when Japan and Russia had a series of border skirmishes, Russia convinced a fighting force of mine-carrying dogs that all open hatches—like the ones on the tops of tanks—had delicious food inside them. Then of course the trainers starved the dogs right before a battle, making them eager to find a target. It's easy to imagine a hungry dog's disappointment when it didn't find any food, but the dogs probably didn't get a chance to be disappointed; the mines were wired to explode when a magnetic trigger was set off by proximity to a metal tank.

Imperial Japan later copied the strategy when its pal Nazi Germany sent Japan thousands of war dogs during World War II. The dogs were strapped to sad little carts (thankfully, I couldn't find a photo) with 50 pounds of explosives in them, which could be detonated remotely. This strategy was reportedly used in Japan's Malay and Hong Kong incursions during World War II.

Not to be outdone for sheer horribleness, the United States tested out time bombs attached to dogs, but that didn't go so great; the dogs kept returning to their owners. The technology never made it to the battlefield. The military later claimed that during testing, no dog was ever attached to an actual bomb, although there was talk in the 1950s of nuclear bomb-carrying dogs. But then again, in the 1950s, the US thought about sticking nuclear bombs everywhere.

Bat-filled bomb. US Government photo via Wikimedia Commons

But back to World War II, when the US was trying to figure out more efficient ways to firebomb Japan, the supervillains in charge of the US military almost unleashed the most chilling form of airborne death ever conceived by humans: bat bombs. Bat bombs were bomb casings filled with thousands of bats, and each bat was carrying its own little radio controlled explosive, which looked like a bat strapped to a cartoon bundle of TNT. Bat bombs were meant to be dropped on major Japanese cities in the millions, quietly dispersing bombs into every nook and cranny (plus presumably some caves and trees). Then when they were detonated, they would have lit the whole city on fire at once. Tests did get as far as the actually-blowing-up-bats phase, and the little guys ended up lighting a military base on fire. Bat bomb mastermind Dr. Lytle Adams later regretted that bat bomb research was abandoned in favor of nuclear bomb research, saying that with bat bombs "Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life."

Attaching bombs to animals seems to have peaked in World War II, but they've allegedly been used by insurgents in Iraq as recently as ten years ago. In 2005, a dog suicide bomb was reported by Iraqi police in Kirkuk. No humans were hurt, and the police statement about the incident was kind of pointed and shamey. "The dog was torn apart by the explosion which caused neither injury among the soldiers nor any damage," police chief Mohammed Barzaji told The Telegraph.

The Age of the Offbeat

Prior to the 1990s, news archive searches don't turn up many stories of people swinging or throwing animals at others. It's a relatively new phenomenon—the stories I mean, probably not the use of animals to whack people with. There's very little to go off of in building a case that attitudes have changed, although Alfred Hitchcock's horrible treatment of the eponymous birds during the making of The Birds makes for good anecdotal evidence. According to Birds leading lady Tippi Hedren, the birds were being treated like, well, weapons:

"When I got to the set I found out there had never been any intention to use mechanical birds because a cage had been built around the door where I was supposed to come in, and there were boxes of ravens, gulls and pigeons that bird trainers wearing gauntlets up to their shoulders hurled at me, one after the other, for a week."

Unsettling offbeat news stories began—as far as I can tell—around 1996 in Scotland, when a drunk sports fan on a bus chucked his Jack Russell terrier at a fan of an opposing team. It sounds a bit like something out of Trainspotting, which came out that same year.

There's a definite profile, like the guy last week in Kansas, they're often wasted or mentally ill, and they're out somewhere with their small, fully grown dog. Then for whatever reason, they get angry at the cops. This shows up again and again and again. In one case in 2011, a guy got mad at the cops and threw a rottweiler puppy, which, at 47 pounds, wasn't so small. In 2013, a lady in Florida reportedly threw a cat at police.

When law enforcement isn't involved, the fickle human heart often is. In 2009, a Project Runway star threw a cat at her boyfriend, according to TMZ. In 2010, a guy in Florida threw his dog at his wife, before threatening to kill her. The tales of romance gone awry just go on and on.

Rarely does an animal-throwing incident involve neither cops nor a broken heart, but there was a time last year when someone threw a snake at a Tim Horton's clerk for refusing to dice some onions. This has been covered before at VICE.

When the condition of the animal makes it into the report, they're usually shaken up, but OK.

But this year has seen a real glut of these stories, and they've taken a turn for the disturbing. There were the two cases last week, of course, in which it doesn't appear that the dogs were seriously injured. Earlier this year, a guy in Kalamazoo, Michigan named Timothy Tucker was convicted of using a puppy to severely beat his girlfriend in late 2014. The human victim suffered a black eye, but the puppy died. Then in April, a guy in Eugene, Oregon named Joshua Horn allegedly chucked his dog at a cop, who then took out his gun and fatally shot the dog.

That brings us pretty much up to date. Here in 2015, we humans have a problem, and that problem is we keep bashing each other with animals. It's not good for the animals, and it's not good for the humans. Granted, this is far from the biggest problem we have as a species, but knocking this shit off is probably a lot easier than fixing climate change.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.