Note: Descriptions of death and injury of animals
The Ground Squirrels in the Desert
I had a conversation recently. It spun me off into weeks of thinking about the value of a life and how different people perceive and understand morality. Here was what happened to spark this:
I was catching up with some people I know when the conversation strayed to the subject of guns and target shooting. Not my cup of tea, but I have no big problem with it. But then one of them mentioned how he loved to go out the central Oregon, Klamath Falls area, and go "rat hunting" for fun. Huh? He clarified. "You know, shooting the gophers and ground squirrels in the fields. The farmers can either poison them or shoot them, and then if you poison them it's in the fields, so..." I could only stare. The others nodded their heads. One exclaimed, "Oh, that does sound like fun!" What.
I'm very conflict-averse, and had no wish to incite bad feelings in this group. So I was therefore thankful that my mask concealed my open-mouthed horror. I said "ok," quietly, and left before I said something I might regret.
I exited the room whispering a string of fervent and shocked profanities. My moral sense was profoundly affronted. Why did I feel so strongly? As I examined my inner landscape, two personal experiences in particular came to mind.
The Tern on the Beach
A few years back I was working on a seabird colony on the Oregon coast. Our job was to monitor the Caspian Terns that nested there and to try to keep their colony from encroaching past the one acre that had been established for them. The overall goal was to curtail the number of juvenile salmonids being eaten by the terns, in order to mitigate for the disastrous impact the dams on the Columbia River have on the native salmon runs. But I digress.
On this particular day I was taking a lunch break back at camp. My co-worker was out patrolling the beaches, when I got a call from him. He told me he'd come across a tern that was badly injured and asked me to come and bring the euthanasia kit. Now, this is the kind of news that we all dreaded. There isn't really a good outcome.
The fate of an injured bird hinged on our project vet. She would talk through the situation with us, asking what looks injured, how badly, etc., and finally makes a call.
One possible outcome is that the tern is ok enough to send in to the local wildlife rehab facility, which involves making a trip out to the boat and back to the dock, then driving to the facility, and back. If the boat is in the dock instead of at the island, we call someone on their day off to come help us out. A pain in the butt, but we do it. Also, Caspian Terns, without fail, die in captivity. They just don't do well.
The second possible outcome is that the bird is too badly injured to try to save, and we must do the humane thing and euthanize it. Our kit contains cotton balls, knock-out juice (I cannot remember the exact chemical we used, but it was highly volatile and evaporated quickly into a gas that made animals go to sleep), and a plastic cup with a rubber glove stretched over it. The procedure is to soak a few cotton balls in knock-out juice and place them in the cup. Then, as the liquid evaporates into a gas, place the birds head through a slit in the rubber glove. As the gas is breathed in, the bird goes to sleep. Sometimes this gas alone will painlessly euthanize the bird. In any case, just to be safe, we then cut its head off (cervical dislocation, to use the technical term) with gardening shears that are kept very sharp and reserved for this purpose. It's a painless death, and certainly far better than the gruesome, brutal fate that awaits it in the wild.
So that morning I got the dreaded call and headed out.
When I reached the location on the beach, my partner and I looked at the bird. It was very very obvious that this one was not going to the rehab clinic. Its chest was lacerated, and its belly open to the sky like you would open a packing box. We could see organs and entrails glistening redly. The fragile bird-skin was peeled back to reveal the muscles of its left leg. Despite all this, the bird's beady black eyes were open and it moved its head to look at us, breathing heavily with shreds of lungs. It looked like perhaps a Peregrine had caught it and been scared off before it could finish the job.
Going against our Best Practices, I had my partner call our vet and pretend to talk through the whole process. Meanwhile, I euthanized the poor thing as quickly as I possibly could. Nothing that looks like that deserves to be conscious.
The tern passed quietly and painlessly from life to non-life.
I've seen a great many dead birds, and injured live ones. This one stuck with me because of the brutality we watched it endure while still clinging to life with everything it had. I will always be grateful we had the ability to ease its death. There is an acute horror in being the cause of injury in the first place...
The Bobcat by the Covered Bridge
Teaching school online during the Covid pandemic has been an adjustment for all teachers. But some things don't change, and showing up to work on time is one of them. On this day I was running a few minutes late, and at the time they seemed like very important minutes. So I was speeding a little. On a twisty road that winds northwards through heavily wooded hills. Where I have, on several previous occasions, only narrowly avoiding placing a deer-shaped dent in the car and leaving a deer-shaped hole in the world.
As I came up on a corner by a covered bridge, I saw a low, compact animal. Bobcat. Much too close! I jerked the wheel hard over as fast as I could possibly react, but it was too late. There was a jarring crash and a sound like bones in a blender. I barely remember pulling off on the first shred of gravel shoulder I could.
"No, no, no no no no..." I repeated frantically as I hauled the car into park and ran back towards the scene.
My instinct and fear was correct: a bobcat lay in the road. It remains the most beautiful animal I have ever seen, with an athletic, leggy body covered with a thick pelt of russet, copper, and gold, patterned with irregular black spots. My horror mounted, and I realized there were tears streaming down my face. Its eyes were open. It was still alive. It stared at me with the piercing, feral gaze that only a wild cat can give, filled with some unknowable emotion between intense fear and anger.
My fault. It wasn't even just dead, that might have been kinder, faster. No, it was still alive, and that meant that I had to put it out of its misery somehow. It obviously couldn't move. My mind was casting about for what I had on hand that could do something terrible yet necessary, when two cars came around the far corner towards us. I yelled and waved the first away from the stricken animal, begging for help as I did so. He demurred on the grounds that he had work to get to. The car behind him, fortunately for me, carried a woman in sturdy farm clothes. I think she saw me, a tall blonde woman in some stupid dress all ready for a day of remote teaching schoolchildren, with hysterical tears streaming down my face, and took pity. She found an old sweatshirt and picked up the bobcat, and we took it across the road where there was some space. As she carried it, she said, "Yeah, it probably needs to be put down." I confess, my hopes for its recovery were rising at that point, and this was crushing.
But when she put it down, the bobcat stood on its wobbly legs and swatted at us angrily, then fell over. This seemed encouraging. My savior used a piece of cardboard to scoot it further off the road and into the bushes, and it spat at her and fought the board. Maybe we didn't have to put it down. The woman agreed. We watched it for a little bit.
The bobcat sat in the bushes, panting. There was blood on its head just below its left ear, but none in its mouth or anywhere else we could see. The woman eventually decided to take off, and I thanked her profusely. I'll say it again here: thank god for helpful people in a crisis. You have no idea how appreciated you are.
Having done everything I could, I drove (more slowly) up the road to find cell service. As soon as I had it, I phoned my friend to check on the spot the bobcat was left. She knows about rescuing feral cats, and about wild animals. Next I called the local wildlife rehabilitation center. As it turned out, the bobcat was gone when my friend arrived. But she looked at the couple of pictures I took and decided that its pupils were not different sizes and looked focused, and the wildlife center agreed that in the circumstances, we'd done everything correctly and there was a decent chance that it was ok. The rattling sound from under my car turned out to be a just hefty piece of plastic that had broken off, not bobcat body.
I am still consumed with guilt that something as stupid and inconsequential as getting-to-work-on-time could have ended the existence of such a creature. Every time I drive by that spot, I remember the incident, and scan the nearby fields in hopes of seeing a big russet cat stalking the voles, ready to greet my human intrusion with a yellow-eyed glare.
Discussion: Shining a Light on Your Dark Side
I wonder what goes through someone's head when they're using live animals as target practice. Perhaps there's a shadow of doubt, or just an invented justification. According to studies, something like 3% of people will intentionally swerve to hit animals in the road. A researcher offered this unsatisfying explanation: "'They aren't thinking, really. It is not something people think about. It just seems fun at the time,' … 'It is the dark side of human nature'" (Source).
Killing is built into nature. Consuming other living things is how each of us continues to live, and many animals seem to kill for no other reason than fun. I think the difference is that we, as humans, are able to think about it in an intelligent and compassionate way. We have complex systems and social codes that define right and wrong, and that place value on empathy. Vegetarians may choose to eat only plants because they do not seem to feel pain in the same way animals do. We treat creatures like dogs and cats as family members. We can choose to buy meat that's been ethically raised and dispatched, or practice responsible hunting and fishing. The culling of invasive species is done to try to protect the integrity of a broader ecosystem, or to help specific species. Even squashing a spider I can find to be acceptable, but it depends a lot on the circumstances. The first option should be to get it outside. In short, when we decide to take a life, there should a purpose behind it.
I have seen animals in pain before. I will end their life to stop their suffering if I must. I do it with the same extreme reluctance that someone aborts a pregnancy, and (I hope) for as good a reason: to spare someone harm. For someone to intentionally cause that pain, however thoughtlessly, is so anathema to me it took me three weeks to be able to speak to the perpetrator again.
Target shooting of animals, thoughtless and destructive, is something we should know better than to do. The perceived benefits can be obtained in other ways, and the evils (death, pain, and lead poisonings of scavengers) could be avoided by application of introspection and about two brain cells worth of thought. I am not guiltless: I used to feed snails to sea anemones as a child, and tricked hermit crabs into leaving their shells. But I learned as I grew that it's not nice to kill the snails in this way, and force the crabs into nakedness and vulnerability. I looked at that dark part of my humanity and shone a light there, as best I could. The hard thing is to remember to keep shining that light, to continually strive to be thoughtful and empathetic, and to keep becoming better.
This is the only place in the universe where life persists, making it an incredibly rare thing. Every life contains possibility, and is worth something. Even a humble ground squirrel could be the start of an enduring lineage that carries forward a billion years into the future. Its life should not be ended for as stupid a reason as target practice by a species that should know better.
I have seen animals in pain before. I will end their life to stop their suffering if I must. I do it with the same extreme reluctance that someone aborts a pregnancy, and (I hope) for as good a reason: to spare someone harm. For someone to intentionally cause that pain, however thoughtlessly, is so anathema to me it took me three weeks to be able to speak to the perpetrator again.
Bobcat Epilogue...
The episode with the bobcat occurred in October 2020. In February of 2021 I got this text from the lady who helped me out that day:
"Just saw your bobcat again this evening. It was crossing at the same spot. Went down right where we set it that time. Was fun to see it doing so well. Thought you'd like to know."
From the bottom of my heart, thank you, J. Shine on.