What does the fact that he tortured and killed animals in childhood says about a person?

When as a child? Some even at 20 can be called children.

He tortured and killed. Tortured while studying? Purposefully, when did you already know the outcome of events?

I've been constantly tormenting a lapdog from 1 to 2 years who, alas, lived with me in the same apartment. Then I lost interest in her. I didn't try to gouge her eyes, skin with a baby fork. I just grabbed her tail, she barked, I let her go.

Those who say that torment is the norm are partly right. But in the context of torturing and killing, it looks different. See for yourself?

This is not the norm. Rather, the consequences of connivance in the family to the affairs of the child, conflicts in the family, etc.

George has a good formulation:

dropped bricks on kittens

But we understand, yes, what to drop (i.e. to do something accidentally) is not the topic of the question - to torment, i.e. cause suffering on purpose.

Yes, children do a lot of things unconsciously, experimentally.

As long as the actions are poorly understood, to what extent is it normal to cause suffering?

Actually, it is not entirely normal. People and their closest relatives (higher primates, which correspond in development to two-three-year-old children) differ in that they are social animals. They are more likely to look for opportunities to build relationships with others than just jerk others around. At the same time, for people, children definitely do not distinguish between a brother (their own) and a dog (a stranger) - they are equally alive. Even adults who are good at distinguishing humans from dogs continue to animate dogs (almost all animals in any way similar to humans).

One of the mechanisms to help this is to understand the emotions of the other.

Actually, babies, from an early age, will scream and cry along with the hitting mother, another baby.

At two years old, they understand the aggressive actions taking place in children's cartoons (Wupsen with Pupsen, all sorts of dangerous situations in the same place, eating some animals by others, etc.) and resent them, crying.

Empathy: conscious empathy with the current emotional state of another person without losing a sense of the external origin of this experience.

Brain activity that reflects the state and actions of other beings is often described as the activity of mirror neurons. These neurons were first recorded in the early 1990s in the frontal cortex of monkeys by Italian scientists Rizzolatti, Gallese and their colleagues at the University of Parma. It has been suggested that mirror neurons are also involved in the neurophysiological mechanisms of empathy.

So unknowingly torturing someone who expresses emotions is not quite the norm (s). By chance - yes, and at the same time learning takes place. Probably there is no need to discuss what has been realized?

Let me quote Eisenstein.

“Every decent child does three things: breaks objects, rips open dolls' bellies or watch bellies to find out what's inside, tortures animals. I was a nasty child. As a child, I did not do either the first, or the second, or the third. On my conscience there is not a single loosened clock, not a single tortured fly and not a single maliciously broken vase ... And this, of course, is very bad. For this is probably why I was forced to become a filmmaker. ”

This fact, first of all, suggests that a person was a living and real child, a researcher who studied this world in all available ways. He jumped off fences, measured puddles with his boots and then dropped bricks on kittens. Then, I hope, they explained to him that jumping off the fences should be done with caution, it is better not to measure puddles with your boots, and the kittens are generally alive and do not seem to deserve such treatment.

As Freud said, sometimes a banana is just a banana. Or didn’t say ...