Less than human

There are certain things that I see that leave me sick to my stomach concerning members of our species. This is one of them - "Burned cat clings to life; Girls charged." Apparently two fifteen year old girls saw a caged cat and poured lighter fluid on it and struck a match. Some boys saw the flames and heard the cat's screams and the girls laughing. How absolutely revolting.

My dad would not have been upset. He often recounted how as a boy if he and his friends saw something, they tried to kill it. More often than not, they succeeded. So he could understand this.

I cannot.

For Dad, an animal is an animal. It is not human; therefore, it does not need to be treated as such. Now I'm not the kind of animal lover to chain myself to a semi hauling turkeys, but I am sickened by such cruelty.

I remember hearing a story about two boys breaking into an animal shelter and taking baseball bats to the animals - mostly cats. Again, my dad didn't condone it, but he again lamented how as a boy he and his friends systematically terminated animals. My mom was horrified. She and I both agreed that in the hereafter, the boys would have a reckoning with my grandmother - a diehard animal lover - especially cats - I picture her waiting for them with a baseball bat ready to smash them in the shins. And then she'll get mean.

But to just kill an animal - whatever it is - just to destroy life horrifies me. It's actions like that that make me feel sick for being human. I remember an old ed psych class from college in which the professor showed us an old film on the Milgrim experiment. Subjects were divided into two groups. One were teachers and the others were learners. The teachers were charged with saying a word. If the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher had to press a button administering a shock to the learner (whom they could only hear, not see). The shocks grew more intense with each missed word. Of course, no one was really shocked. The students were paid to just groan and scream in mock pain. The real onus was on the teachers. Would they continue to inflict pain? Some reasoned that the learner agreed to participate in the experiment, so they felt justified to continue administering the shocks. Others refused, despite warnings from the scientists that they must continue to finish the experiment. Of course, that was all part of the experiment too.

I found that cool, but what really interested me was when Dr. McCartney mentioned how when the experiment was adapted to monkeys (one monkey could pull a lever and receive a banana, but he could see through a glass into an adjacent room where another monkey was hooked up to electrodes. When it pulled the lever for the banana, the other monkey was given an actual shock (kind of hard to teach a monkey to fake being shocked - though I would argue it is easier to teach a monkey to feign being hurt than it is to teach those wretches in the cat story above to be human). Guess what? It didn't take long for the first monkey to realize its actions caused the other monkey to be injured. There were several cases, according to Dr. McCartney, were monkeys went WITHOUT food for extended periods to spare their fellow monkey from pain.

And yet those two girls burned a cat alive and laughed.

Of course, Dad would argue that in nature if a wolf were to snatch a cat, the results wouldn't be pretty. But I can live with that. Nature is nature. What is natural about burning a cat alive and laughing? Or setting a turtle on fire and posting it on youtube?

Psychologists already know animal cruelty is a hallmark in serial killers.

What boggles my mind is how these girls lack any kind of empathy. While Dad didn't flinch at having to put an animal down or run over a gopher or raccoon on the road, he didn't actively seek cruelty either. And the summer before he died, he even let slip to Kristie how maybe he wasn't so tough after all when it came to dispatching animals.

My dad was the designated hit man on the farm. If a sheep was injured, he put it down. If a dog was hit and had a broken back, he put it down. If a stray dog was nosing around the flock, he put an end to it - even if it was the neighbor's. I know dozens of pets who met their deaths at the end of Dad's .22. However, one summer night sitting in our porch, Dad mentioned how the pets all looked him right in the eyes as he pulled the trigger. And he felt the weight of that stare a little more each time.

I think he felt the weight of taking life. Even if it was serving a purpose - say putting the pet out of its misery or protecting his sheep. I know I felt sick to my damn stomach after hitting a deer this spring. But I sucked it up and attempted to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible. But these girls were inflicting misery and pain. What is worse than being burned alive?

I just can't tolerate a senseless waste of life. When we were fishing at Stump Lake two weeks ago, Brian, with whom we were camping, noticed that in one of the trees we tied the boat to was a swallows nest. Over the next few hours we watched as the birds steadily brought food to their young. It was amazing. Yet he said that he personally knew people who would think nothing of taking that next and throwing it into the lake. He then told me about how once after a day of hunting (and don't even get me started on that), the crew was heading to the shack (to probably get even more drunk) when they came across a mother raccoon and several of her young on the road. Despite his request to leave them be, they opened fire. And left them on the road.

I cannot comprehend stupidity on this level. In all of the known solar system, there has never been found one trace of life. Yet here we waste it so foolishly.

I'm not naive enough to think things will ever change. When I worked at the county highway department, I once saw my supervisor - who was a loving father - gleefully run over a group of sparrows on the road. For whatever reason the birds refused to leave the highway (I think they were clinging to the heat or moisture coming up from a culvert running beneath them). He turned around and ran over some more. Then he turned around again and again. Laughing each time. I was sickened and told him so. I mean the Romans - who had zoos, running water, and museums while our ancestors were still hunting and gathering - fed people to lions, had females prisoners of war gang raped, and sentenced condemned criminals to fill in on stage for actors whose rolls called for them to be murdered (so there was an authentic murder on stage). Sure the Nazis killed 12 million people, but they also produced brilliant works of art - particularly - I believe - in music.

So while these girls might torch a couple of cats, whose to say what they'll do when they have a child? Remember the lady in Chicago who put her baby in a microwave and cooked it to death? Is it that far of a leap? Or was it just a lack of empathy? Was it a lack of humanity? I don't know.

I think this poem gets at the heart of the situation - and it scares the hell out of me.

Woodchucks
Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

Scary, eh?