If I'm a natural born killer, it certainly didn't feel that way this afternoon. Hours ago I took a shovel to a little dude's head. Felt jittery afterward. Like I needed a drink.
I was out in the backyard. Our dogs treed a squirrel. Like they have dozens of times. Because the tree was a smallish one, 15 feet from ground to topmost growth, and not densely leafed, the dogs could see it. And they barked and barked and barked. So I did what I've done before. I took a nearby hose and aimed the narrow spray at the squirrel. Previous times the outcome has been a squirrel leaping to the base of the nearby pine tree, scampering up 40 feet or more to where the dogs quickly forget about it, though absolutely thrilled by the excitement.
Not so this time. Maybe our larger, athletic dog is catching on. The young male squirrel did make the leap, but only got two feet up the pine. After a ruckus lasting two, maybe three seconds -- punctuated by dog and squirrel cries -- I yelled at our dog to back off. She did. The squirrel was still alive, but gravely injured. What could I do but take the nearby shovel and bean it?
Talk about mixed feelings.
Note to my psychologist-self of the behaviorist perspective: Apparently our dog has failed to generalize the concept of "catch and release" from tennis balls to squirrels.
Odd thing, had the squirrel been a real danger to me or my family, it's violent demise and my hand in it would have been no problem. Maybe that's not odd at all. Or had it been an extremely ugly creature, an equivalently sized grasshopper, say, my feelings would have been much less mixed.
Maybe all I needed is to have grown up on a farm. Or with hunters. Maybe my aversion to killing can be chocked up to culture. All of it? Probably not. Most? I wonder.
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[the photograph is of a live oak in a nearby forest.]
Tags: culture, emotion, photography
March 31st, 2012 at 4:34 am
Hey great little post about terminally injured squirrels you got here. I (and my mom and brother) found ourselves in a similar situation last week. My two dogs, both beagles, pounced on a severely injured squirrel – threw it about – for 15 seconds like Free Willy playing with a dead seal before my mom could get between them. She ended up with the squirrel attached to her thumb, after my dogs had thrown it around, it had grabbed onto her for dear life. Well the poor feller was breathing, but looked pretty worse for ware. His head was bleeding, and his hind leg almost completely severed. Us being city folk, didnt have the guts to do the poor guy in. We put a cardboard box over it. Its breathing was getting labour some, but the little fellow kept poking his head out and scratching at the box, so we thought, hey hes still got some spunk hes doin alright. It took a few tricks but we transferred him to a plastic box that I had drilled a generous amount of holes into so that he could breathe. We phoned Toronto Wildlife Service, but it was after 6pm, and they told us we’d have to keep him in a dark cool place until the morning, then we’d have to drive him to the outskirts of the city to have him submitted to their emergency clinic. I guess looking back now it was a long shot. So when my poor mum got up bright an early the next morning to take her injured friend to the hospital, she’d discovered that he’d passed away over night, and now was stiff as a board. It broke her heart, she had my brother bury him in the backyard under the cherry blossom bush, we even put some cinder blocks on top of his mound, with a cement cast sculpture of my dog Sunny, who passed away many years ago, on top to signify the little guys final resting place. I just hope it wasnt the fact that I didnt poke enough holes in his plastic waiting room that did the poor sucker in. Anyways may he rest in peace. Amen.