opening emails I shouldn't

I have been known to have been suckered once or twice by emails people send ... "LOOK CLOSELY at the screen" they say, and then I am peering at my screen something horrible pops out and scares me. I would like to have thought that the days of being suckered were past me. But no.

I am a part of this email group at work. If you want to be a part of it you can sign up and its the group that anyone can advertise things for sale, send jokes or news stories or whatever. If you don't want to be a part of it you don't have to and then you don't have to worried about getting your email box filled up with things unrelated to work. I signed up. I receive the emails.
Yesterday this email comes around about hazards at work and there is a story about being careful around paper shredders. There is a photo attached to the email. What do I do? I open it.

Honestly I can say that I thought it was a joke. I thought it was one of those emails where they talk about how the faxes weren't going through and when you look at the picture there is a cute little kitten attacking the fax machine. I honestly expected there to be some funny thing "shredding" paper. Oh no. It was a REAL photo of someones REAL hand after going through a paper shredder. I threw up in my mouth. I can't get the image out of my head. It was downright NASTY. Who does that anyway? Who sends those nasty pictures around? I thought the email group was all rainbows and sunshine but it is not.

But worse than opening emails when I "think" it is going to be something of a joke is the fact that last week I went to a link - which there was a warning for - for video taken undercover of the treatment of animals in the USA at a dairy farm. The man in the video had been charged with multiple animal cruelty charges. (check out the "story"...no video! here) There were MANY warnings about the video. I thought " how bad could it be?" and I went to check it out. Let me just say this.. When there IS a warning about something - it is likely there for a reason. This warning was appropriate. I think I watched about 8 seconds of the video and I turned it off. It was 8 seconds too much though and it was very disturbing. I guess I just don't want to believe that things like animal cruelty to this extent can happen in the world I live in. I just do not understand why anyone would be motivated in any way to be so harmful, so destructive and cruel. I just don't understand human nature. I think to myself - it can't be that bad can it? But it can. Oh, it can.

There's a reason for labels people! In case you didn't already know. So I'm going out on the web now to google rainbows and sunshine so I can get the image of shredder hand out of my mind.