A little bit of a psychopath

At the beginning of the summer, during a dinner between Atlanta Fringe performances with family and friends, the conversation drifted to that bit of wisdom from Law and Order about how psychopaths often began by torturing animals as children. We were all nodding sagely when my stepbrother said, "I mean, haven't we all tortured an animal at least once?"

I thought, "Not me!" I was a vegetarian for four years. I don't kill spiders. I adopted pets that needed homes. I am love animals!

Except...

Artistic rendering of moon jellies from markshasha.com

Beautiful, right? Elegant. They glow in the dark at night, too. Imagine being in a boat in the evening looking into water as luminous as the starry sky above. 

I was the death of many a poor moon jelly. During the summers that my sister and I spent in Long Island we went to the beach with our cousins multiple times a week. As groups of children do, we invented new games to play. We tied our beach towels like capes and jumped from the bulkhead onto the sand. We dug canals. And we raced melting moon jellies down the wooden stair railing. 

The water was full of the creatures, which bumped up against us as we swam, sometimes putting us into a panic, wondering if we would get stung. We knew the moon jellies didn't sting, but there were occasionally red jellyfish in the water that did, and when you didn't see what you bumped it was a little disconcerting. 

The moon jellies didn't sting. They didn't even appear to have tentacles. Just little blobs of jelly. We would catch some and put them in buckets. Then two contenders would choose their jellies. They would each place their jelly at the top of the railing and release. The jellies would slowly slide down the railing, but as they did, they evaporated. There might be nothing left before the jelly made it to the end. 

I did this. I'm not proud of it. But is it true, do you think? Have we all, at least once, acted like a psychopath?