Cody Roberts tortured a wolf and I can’t sleep

Trigger warning: Animal Cruelty

It’s 2 a.m. in Minnesota and I am crying in rage and grief. Trying to be quiet because my husband and 11-year-old are asleep upstairs. I want to howl my pain to the wild night but this page will have to do.

You might have heard by now of Cody Roberts, the person who ran down a wolf with his snowmobile in Wyoming, then brought the horribly injured animal to the Green River Bar in Daniel, Wyoming, duct taped its mouth shut and tortured it before finally bringing it outside to kill it. But not before making sure to take a photo with the suffering animal, a huge grin on his face because apparently in Daniel, Wyoming, it’s great fun to inflict torture on helpless, living things.

I had just gotten into bed and was glancing at a news site on my phone. I read about Cody Roberts, and all desire to sleep fled. Emotions stormed through me. Grief, mostly, pity for the wolf, and rage, a dumfounded rage that needed an outlet. I swung my bare legs over the side, fumbled for my glasses, thinking, “I’ll call the bar tonight. What time is it in Wyoming? They might still be open.”

I went into our front porch in my nightgown with the little cats on it and closed the door behind me and tried to stifle my groans of despair, mindful of my sleeping family. Oh, the things you utter when you are so deeply troubled! The profanity mixed with bewilderment and grief, the appeals to God!

I dialed the number of the Green River Bar. Its website said it was still open but the phone rang and rang and rang. Probably I wasn’t the only one calling. I wasn’t the only one who needed to tell them: We are America and we are grieving because of what happened in your bar! They had heard too much. They had disabled their phone.

Cody Roberts owns a trucking company, and others have been sharing the number and address online so I called that line next, but, like the bar, nobody answered. Not even an answering machine. So then, still uttering profanities, cries still leaking out of me, I went back upstairs for an envelope, and brought it down, and I wrote Cody Roberts a letter. It was the least eloquent letter I’ve ever written, but it was raw and honest, and I put his address on the front and my full name and return address in the upper left hand corner, and he’ll probably never read it but it was something I could do.

But what else? I couldn’t go back to sleep. Ah, I’ll write, I thought. I’ll write because that’s what I do. That’s how I cope. I’ll put my grief and despair out into the universe, because, well, just because I have to.

Now, I want to be kind to Cody Roberts. He may have been shorted oxygen at birth and would therefore not be responsible for his actions. But according to news reports, the bar had other customers at the time and presumably employees as well, none of whom stopped him, and the odds of all of them being deprived of oxygen at birth seems to be fairly long. But I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, too. I can only guess that they were so bleary from booze and pills that what was transpiring before them seemed like a hallucinogenic nightmare and it was only later, under the stunned gaze of their fellow Americans, that they realized what happened was real and was not casting Daniel, Wyoming in the best of lights. I hate to think any rational human being would sit by and let torture unfold before them without lifting a finger to intervene.

There are many rhetorical questions on my mind. For instance, Oh, God, why? How could he? Why did nobody stop it? None of which I expect will ever be answered. But they are the first utterances of a shocked and grieving heart, and they are good questions, they indicate in anyone who asks them an utter lack of understanding of the wanton pleasure involved in the torture of a helpless creature. And that’s good. We don’t, truly, ever want to understand what drove Cody Roberts to do what he did on Feb. 29. We don’t want to slip inside the dark vortex of that sick mind, that sick heart, and see what he sees and feel what he feels.

Cody Roberts has been fined $250 — not for running over the wolf with his snowmobile, because apparently that part is legal in Daniel, Wyoming. Wolves are not federally protected there, and they are considered predators. So Wyoming is apparently A-OK with people killing wolves in whatever manner they wish, even leaving them maimed and suffering. However, possession of a live wolf is considered a misdemeanor, Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Brian Nesvik told the Cowboy State Daily. Hence the $250 fine.

There are times when I hear about the needless suffering of an animal at human hands that I have to admit I cry to God to end the world, already. We are a deeply flawed and unworthy species. We don’t deserve this earth.

The truth is that even though the world is witnessing what Cody Roberts did to that wolf, Cody Roberts is not the only one that enjoys torturing helpless things. I’ve seen it elsewhere in too many places.

In processing my grief now, sitting cross-legged under a blanket on my couch, typing on my laptop, I think about how much power we humans possess. Even those of us who feel so powerless wield so much power.

It helps me to remember that we humans have power not just to hurt and destroy, but to help and create. We can create such a beautiful world. We can make each other and our pets feel loved and safe. We can treat each other with kindness and empathy. That is nothing to look down on. That is an amazing power. Just being kind to someone, listening to someone, sharing a joke or a compliment, offering a meal or sharing a meaningful song, these are all extremely powerful acts.

We all have our spheres of influence. We have the choice to spread hate or love to those around us. I never understood that when I was young, the way our words and actions ripple in concentric circles around us. But they do. They influence others just the way others influence us.

And maybe that’s what happened in the Green River Bar in Daniel, Wyoming. Cody Roberts and all around him — his sister who defends him and reenacted the incident using a wolf pelt, the bar patrons who said nothing or maybe even laughed or urged him on — inhabit a mountainous, blustery, harsh land. Mountain men and native people held rendezvous here during the beaver trapping days. There are 61 houses in Daniel, 108 people, descendants of English and German immigrants, and maybe in this small enclave people are used to Cody Roberts’ cruelty. It’s familiar. It’s Cody being Cody. So inured are they to Cody’s ways, and maybe they share his views, that they don’t see them anymore. It’s part of a toxic miasma they don’t even know is toxic, they have endured it for so long. And maybe the appalled gaze of the nation will wake them up, will help them realize that how they are, what they tolerate, is not OK. When my mom was upset with us kids, she’d say, “I’m going to slaughter you!” and we never thought anything of it; it was just something she said to blow off steam, and it wasn’t until I thoughtlessly said it myself one day as a grown-up, and to see the shocked and even frightened look on my companion’s face, that it struck me that maybe it was a little bit weird.

Oh, I hope that the nation’s reaction will awaken Daniel, Wyoming. And maybe they’ll start to think, “You know, maybe this shit ain’t normal.”

Because that’s the only way I’ll sleep tonight. Crawl back into bed next to my warm husband and comfort myself with that hope, that good people will speak out, that we’ll love harder than ever, and that the ripples of love and goodness will reach the next person, and the next, making their way eventually across the prairies and the tumbleweeds and the mountains to Daniel, Wyoming.