Evil is not difficult to define; you know it when you see it.  You can judge a person’s deed as evil and for most of us it is easy to name Adolf Hitler as the embodiment of the ultimate evil person.  There should not be any redeeming features in a person of Hitler’s ilk, but by all historical accounts Hitler loved his dogs and treated them well.  Hitler’s dog would not have seen his master as an evil person.  Yet the audacity, the very scope of the evil Hitler ordered and caused is almost beyond the scope of comprehension.  A normal person cannot contain that much vile cruelty, hatred, wicked destruction, torture, and killing.  It is sickening to contemplate Hitler’s legacy for any amount of time.

Michael Vick is a football player who kept a kennel of fighting dogs and who, to my knowledge, has never killed a person.  He has served his prison term and plays football again.  Yet Michael Vick’s dogs would not see their master as a good person.  They saw in him an evil akin to Hitler.  Cruelty and horror were embodied in Vick, from the canine perspective.  The fact that Vick mutilated and tortured dogs for his entertainment is incomprehensible to a mind, human or canine alike.  Vick “punished” losing dogs by hanging them or drowning them.  He is accused of tossing a family pet into the dog fighting pen to watch the bloodshed.

A lesser known evil man is Gene Bitler, a poacher who while trespassing and cutting the head off a buck (he was interested in the trophy, not the meat), was confronted by the landowner, Marvin Macy .  Bitler’s two sons 18 and 15, were with him at the time.  The elder Bitler attacked Macy from behind, stabbing him in the kidneys, slashing his face and abdomen, exposing intestines, before leaving the man to die.  The poachers then stole Macy’s vehicle and left the scene followed by his sons.  Macy managed to hold his intestines in from the near disembowelment, and walk a half mile to a shed where he climbed into his grain truck and drove himself home.  Macy survived the attack.  

Bitler was found and was eventually convicted of attempted murder, criminal hunting, deprivation of property, contributing to the misconduct of a child, fleeing and attempting to elude, taking deer in a closed season, hunting without a tag or permit, and wanton waste.  His sons initially lied to protect their father, and only offered testimony in exchange for immunity from felony prosecution.  Gene Bitler was sentenced to seven years, eleven months in prison.