Circle of Life, Ring of Death

A cute little gray mouse skittered across the stove last night as my Love and I were heaping up our plates for dinner.  I squealed, not because I’m afraid of mice—I think they are adorable and cute and it’s not their fault that they poop all over my forks and dishes and cabinets (not that that is acceptable, by the way)—but because it startled me.  They are so quick!

My Love, however?  Does not think that mice are cute.  And there is absolutely no excuse for pooping on his cutlery.  Once inside his house, sweet little gray mouse is The Enemy and must be destroyed.

It is a book another blog post entirely about my childhood, introversion, sensitivity and overly developed sense of empathy for animals and how children’s books aggravated a natural proclivity to personalize animals, to consider them at least equal to people and often prefer them more.  I enjoy watching and interacting with them, I respect them and their habits and definitely gain a sense of peace from their presence.

Growing up on a farm, especially in circumstances of near poverty as my Love did, perhaps tends to leave one with a different perspective.  At eight years old he was hunting songbirds with his slingshot, which his grandmother would fry up for him when he got home.  From that point until he left Cuba at age 19, he learned how to slaughter and butcher anything else the family ate: fish, duck, chicken, rabbit, goat, sheep, pig.  He is still an avid hunter though only for food, not for bragging or mounting.

This has been hard for me to reconcile with the knowledge that he also enjoys animals in his way, which is similar to mine.  But for him, there is another level that I am only just beginning to understand.  Living with, eating and killing animals gives him a sense of connection, both to a way of life and to life itself. 

Of which death is an inherent and inescapable part.

I’m beginning to sense that all of my previous interactions with animal death have been an effort to keep the reconciliation of my own death out of my consciousness.  The few times in my 37 years that I have come into contact with death, I have always averted my eyes, literally and emotionally.  But living in closer proximity with both nature and farm (and with my Love) has forced me to look, even when I didn’t want to. 

Like the time I went to feed the chickens and found one of my sweet red hens with a baby mouse clutched in her beak.  I only figured out what it was because it let out a shrill, terrified squeak as she bludgeoned it to death on the ground.  It was over so quickly that before I could process what I had just witnessed, I watched, shocked, horrified, and dumbfounded as the hen paraded her fresh, limp morsel around the yard, growling to keep the other hens away.  (Yes, chickens growl, in their own way.  It is very disconcerting.)

Or the time when I was walking my dog around the small pond at the back of the property where a flock of bufflehead ducks had settled in for the winter, and my presence caused them to fly up making it oh so easy for a peregrine falcon that had been perched nearby to nail one of those precious little ducks midair.  Shocked and horrified (again) I watched the falcon tear that duck to pieces, thinking maybe there was something I could do to help the duck and knowing full well that there was absolutely nothing that I could—or even should—do.  The falcon eats meat.  If not this duck, then another or the falcon dies. 

The hens don’t have this excuse.  They’re just opportunists.  Now I think, don’t turn your back on a chicken.  I’ve seen their dark side.

 

Do not turn your back on a chicken

Sometimes I fear that my heart is hardening.  The me that accepts things like this as “the cycle of life” is a completely foreign being.  Most of the time though, I welcome the change.  It feels more realistic and I think that the shift, though mightily uncomfortable, is ultimately a good thing.  I began eating meat again 5 years ago, but I’m only just beginning to comprehend my professed reason for 11 years of vegetarianism—if I can’t kill it (or at least face its death) then I don’t feel justified in eating it.

I was startled again this morning when, while drinking my tea in the quiet, I heard the snap of the mousetrap.  When he gets up, my Love will empty the trap and confirm for me that the mouse’s death was quick and painless, and I will hope that he is not fibbing for my sake. 

I won’t look.