So a person who commits a murder, gets away with it for twenty years, and becomes a bum shouldn't be prosecuted?

And how does serving his country make it OK?

If he were serving his country for a VALID reason, I'd respect him, greatly. Anyone who fights or kills for a valid reason, I've got a great amount of respect for. I am joining the military after all, so that makes sense. But he was like a Nazi. I don't pay much respect to Nazi's either.

He clearly enjoyed murdering Kaya. I wouldn't be able to forgive him if that happened to me. I would've killed him the second I saw him.

I never said that, and I don't feel like explaining myself to a stranger on the internet I've never met any longer.

then what's the point of coming to a forum?

I do believe that her mother as well as Hakoda would've been dissapointed in her, and not have wanted her to track down and kill the man responsible on his way home from the market in her/his wife's name. I'm not sure what his has to do with the points I was debating though.

BTW, I was thinking about this last night, wondering what exactly my stance was on the issue, and I realized that I believe it's possible for revenge and justice to co-exist in the same action; sometimes an act of vengeance can bring justice (although I do agree revenge, in and of itself, isn't motive enough for murder), and sometimes a court-sanctioned act of justice can at the same time be an act of revenge (more often in cases of the death penalty)

If you want to be technical about it, Katara did recieve closure in the end. Sure, she stated she'd never forgive him, but she also realized that he was not a man worth killing.

There are hundreds of examples of animal compassion; mostly with dogs protecting humans and other social animals protecting their family. Yes, you could argue, "they're just protecting their family." but so was Katara's mother and anyone else protecting their family; that doesn't mean it's not compassion-motivated. Vampire bats will give their own food (regurgitated blood) to other vampire bats who have not fed in days. In a scientific study in a lab; captive rhesus monkeys were shown to be reluctant and often refused to pull a chain that got them food if they saw that pulling the chain would cause pain to another monkey (through electric shock). They were far less likely to pull the chain if they had been shocked themselves. Elephants have been repeatedly documented by wildlife biologists in the field demonstrating compassion for their own; in one case making a co-ordinated effort to save a baby elephant out of a mud hole. Animals have even acted altruistically to animals whom they didn't know; even across species. National Geographic has documented footage of a hippo scaring a crocodile away from an antelope it had in its jaws and examining the antelope's body (it was too late for the antelope by that point). One wildlife researcher documented an elephant attempting to pull a baby rhino from a mud hole. There are also a number of cases of animals adopting baby animals of another species as their own (maternal instincts you could argue, but it's also maternal instinct in humans, that doesn't mean there's no compassion there as well). Now some anecdotes of animal compassion are indeed not all they're cracked up to be such as in claims of dolphins saving humans, etc. but compassion does exist in the animal kingdom.

Morals are a bit more rare, but they too exist in other species, although they may be harder to pin down because they are more often expressed through restraint and non-action, rather then action.. In many social animals, harming or even stealing food from the young of a group is off limits and in the unusual case that an animal breaks this rule, that animal is stopped, and sometimes attacked. In monkey troops, monkeys are expected to alert the rest of their group when they find food. When a monkey is caught secretly hogging food for himself it's not tolerated.Some animals, at least on an individual level, do indeed show expectations of certain moral behaviors. Morality is but an evolutionary trait that came into existance to aid the function of society.

Mercy is the hardest to confirm in another species and I have no credible examples of it, but I have been surprised by the animal kingdom enough to say that it'd be unwaise to say as a blanket generalization that mercy does not exist in any other species whatsoever other then Homo Sapiens.

We are not separated from other animals by the kinds of behaviors and traits that exists in us, but by the degree it exists.

Well that post was a lot longer then I inteded . . . I guess I sort of went off a bit. Ah well . . . I'm posting it anyway