Until today, I was a murder virgin. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I’ve been killing chickens with some regularity to feed our cheetahs. But I’ve been deftly avoiding this day for a long time but knew it would come eventually. Rabbit was on the menu today for the cats and my time had come to do the dirty work. I’ve seen how Mmamarapelo kills them and it’s neither quick nor pretty. I decided to do it myself not for some bullshit internal macho overcome-my-fear mind challenge. And not because it was simply my turn to do it, as no one else enjoys this unpleasant task either. I did it because I thought I could do a quicker dispatch job to reduce the suffering time. Their (the ladies in the sanctuary) technique is rather slow and nonchalant. This work requires urgency and purpose.
I walked to the rabbit cage and picked up the biggest one by the legs. By this time, my conscience had already left the building. I asked it to step outside and wait for me. I was in machine mode. Just a programmed robot with a tool and a target, on a mission. Picked up the wood stick, tried to wrestle it into an immobile position to minimize the squirming, an unspoken prayer, a momentary hesitation, and then clubbed its head as hard as I could. First hit simply dazed it but the second was much cleaner and it sent the rabbit into convulsions. Bleeding from the nose & mouth, writhing on the ground, squealing and gasping. In a panicked hushed plea quieter than a whisper, I began repeating “please die” under my breath. The third blow most likely severed all brain activity even though it was still alive. I started to cuss in anger, generally directed at this cruel world, that such violence was ‘necessary’. The fourth was just to make sure. The seizuring slowed, breathing stopped, and life was draining out of it. Threw down the executioner club in absolute disgust.
Picked up the lifeless bloodied rabbit and put it in a bucket. As I walked it back to the clinic building, I was shaking. Laid it out on a wood chopping block and began to cut it in half with a large knife, one side for each cat. To my horror, its muscle tissue was still twitching when I opened it up and for an instant that seemed eternal, I thought it might still be alive. Logic quickly returned and realized it was just leftover neurons still firing. .
At this point, I was an empty numb wreck. Neither man nor machine. Emanuel drove me to the cheetah enclosure and the rabbit disappeared into the belly of a carnivore within seconds. I didn’t say a word the rest of the day or night.
There’s something about a rabbit that is particularly tricky. It’s a very difficult animal to kill cleanly. It has no exposed neck and limited vulnerable points since its just a lumpy fur ball. Its quick and squirmy and doesn’t let you get a good look at a strike point. Chickens, goats, sheep…..much easier. The slit throat species.
My deeds today brought me down among the bottom-feeders. If I could feel any lower, I’d be underground. This issue of killing animals to save other animals forces me to contemplate what it means to be human. I can understand the food chain within nature. But I cannot understand it in captivity. Its no longer “natural selection”. It becomes preferential selection, imposed upon and justified with human terms. Not exactly what Darwin had in mind since captive animals were virtually a foreign concept to ol’ Chuck. Some would argue that it’s perfectly acceptable to sacrifice some animals to feed endangered ones. Perhaps. But are we not assigning value to animals with a bias or ulterior motive? Diamonds are not more inherently valuable than emeralds. They are both just rocks. One just happens to be more rare than the other so the free market forces of supply & demand dictate the price.(helped along by some shrewd marketing and a gullible public). A cheetah is not more inherently valuable than a rabbit, it just happens to be endangered. Does that justify killing Peter to feed Paul? This has been a mentally taxing burden to reconcile. A culpable itch on my brain that I can’t scratch.
Across the world in developing nations (3rd world is a geo-political elitist notion which should be erased from our lexicon. There is only one world with countries at varying stages of development), donkeys, goats, sheep, chickens, cattle, oxen, yak and horse are sacrificed, enslaved, and/or abused to serve the whims of mankind. Not to mention the primates & rodents as lab experiments in medical research facilities. Why am I more emotionally affected by the death of a rabbit over a chicken. The issue of ‘cute’ is rearing its ugly head again. We selectively choose to save the cute: panda’s, chimps, fur seal cubs, dolphins, monkeys, tigers, butterflies, eagles and we ignore the not-so-cuddly: wild dogs, hyenas, warthogs, wildebeest, snakes, lizards, frogs, croc’s, rodents, spiders, worms, vultures. Sentimentality’s a bitch, ain’t it?!
This may seem like a minor hair splitting issue but it becomes a moral predicament when you are asked to kill with your own hands so another may live. (This became a source of sub-surface friction between myself and Dr. Good, the vet I work for. She has never killed a rabbit with her own hands and shudders at the idea of it). When we can’t hide behind someone else’s dirty work, it takes on a whole new visceral stench that one must grin & bear. Maybe someday I’ll come to reconcile this issue but for now, it weighs me down and makes me feel like a lesser subspecies of Homo Sapien, a prehominid, not yet upright and hairy like Chewbacca.
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