Against nature?

This story has a special poignancy for me: as a kid growing up in the west midlands with an interest in zoology, going to Dudley zoo was an all too rare [we were poor] treat. So I could picture the place in this story. As to the main point at issue: the cruelty of children. We all know it really. Children show up both the nobility and the wickedness of humanity in stark relief sometimes. We over-romanticise childhood [see Rowan Williams' perceptive analysis of related issues in Lost Icons] and then find it hard not to be over-shocked when something like this happens. There's a whole lot of stuff here to be unpicked about ideas of right and wrong, accountability, socialisation and group behaviour.
It does seem to me also that social attitudes to animals and a certian degree of hypocrisy is detectable here though: there's shock at how these lads treated a young wallaby, but that is comparitively short cruelty and somewhat spontaneous compared with factory farming which is cruel in a systematic and calculated way and socially approved. I'm not suggesting these boys have any idea of what factory farming involves but I am questioning a sense of outrage that many haveat the behaviour of these boys while happily buying the produce of systematic cruelty to animals.