Freezer

This might sound a little harsh, but every word is true, taken from real-life experience and observations.

If you love animals - and I don’t mean in the “I LUV Animals” bumper sticker sporting, Halloween costumes for your pets buying, hand-painted protest sign hoisting kind of way, but actually love them - you’ll have to become comfortable with death. If you love animals enough to want to work with them, you’re going to have to become comfortable killing them.

I love to teach people, especially kids, about nature, especially animals. But there are two topics I’m never quite sure how to approach: sexuality and death. My lack of surety stems not, as you might think, from a personal discomfort with the subjects or an embarrassment about them and the thought of broaching those subjects with children. No, I shy away from addressing animal sexuality and death with children because I can’t be sure that their parents have prepared them for the world in a true and meaningful way.

I suppose I should stop feeling surprised at this point, but I may never get over just how many adults struggle with the idea of death. There are adults who believe in a supreme deity who promises them beauty and peace and comfort after death; there are adults who won’t think about or talk about or even plan for their own deaths; and there are adults who think that death is too sad or scary a subject for children. What these adults don’t understand is that death is all around children.

Consider, if you will, the heartwarming sight of kids seated around a holiday evergreen, opening their holiday gifts. Does it sound less appealing if I remind you that the holiday evergreen was once a normal tree growing in the forest (or, nowadays, a tree farm)? What if I remind you how a person with an axe or a chainsaw cut through the trunk of the tree, severing the microscopic tubes it used to transport food and water through its body? Do you still feel the warm holiday glow if you think about how that tree will sit in its stand with its trunk in a few inches of water and crystalline “tree food” (sugar) for a few weeks as its needles desiccate and turn brown, eventually sprinkling to the carpet and reminding everyone that it’s time to put the tree out on the curb? The dead tree?

Let’s examine another dear childhood memory, that of catching fireflies on warm summer evenings. How many adults can remember their terrible act as a child: in order to more fully discover the mechanism by which these fascinating insects produce their bioluminescence, I and so many like me smeared the abdomen of more than one firefly across a hard surface and watched the glowing goo leak out. In doing so, we broke open the abdomen, spilling more than just the bioluminescent material - we killed the insects.

And what about the child I observed just the other day on a walk through my neighborhood, gleefully brandishing a cabbage white butterfly by one wing in front of her mother’s face? I watched the girl’s face, intent with investigation or destruction, as she pulled the opposite wing from the animal’s body. Death is part of discovery.

So it’s no secret to an observant person that casual death is all around us, happening almost every second in nature. But, as I said, it is one thing to have a love for and interest in animals and become comfortable with the inevitability of their deaths. Killing is another beast entirely.

Although this seems like an appropriate place for a discussion of hunting and fishing, and the People for the Eating of Tasty Animals would surely also like their platform to be featured here, that is not the kind of killing I’m talking about. In fact, those avenues might almost be preferable. When I say a person who wants to work with animals needs to get comfortable killing them, I mean it as a much more personal experience.

I’ve heard stories from zookeepers about an almost equivalent experience " not of killing animals, but of the necessity for the keepers to be present for the necropsy. A necropsy is an autopsy done on an animal. Zookeepers care for these animals day in and day out, forming strong, long-term relationships with their charges. When the animals die, these people have to stand there and watch as a veterinarian pulls the corpse apart to diagnose the cause of death. If you want to work with animals, death will become personal.

But I was going to talk about killing. Apart from killing bugs as kids and occasionally hitting an animal with a car, most people can’t say that they’ve killed a lot of animals. I have. I won’t say that I’m proud of it, but I will say that I’m at peace with it.

I spent a summer working at a wildlife rehabilitation center because I love animals and I want to use my passion to make the world a better place for wildlife. I quickly learned I couldn’t take death personally and survive the summer. What you have to remember is that the animals brought to a wildlife rehab center aren’t healthy and happy and safe - they’re sick, broken, orphaned, wounded, and often near death when they cross our threshold. Some of them die on the exam table, some of them die during their first night in our care, and some of them will inexplicably die after several days or weeks of seeming to improve.

All of those situations, though, actually fall more under the first category of being comfortable with death. The killing comes with humanity. The resources and manpower rehabbers have at their disposal get used up quickly. If an animal comes in, too sick or too injured for us to be able to help it, there’s truly only one option.

She calls, explaining in full and lengthy detail the situation with her goose/duck/squirrel/bunny: how it’s obviously hurt and she’s been putting out food. But she’s really worried " she doesn’t want it to be killed by any nasty predatory animals who might eat it. Can she bring it to us? Of course. But what will we do to it? She doesn’t want us to euthanize it. If we can’t fix it and release it, she wants me to promise that we’ll keep it here or give it to a good home. “I’m sorry, I can’t make any judgments without seeing the animal in person, ma’am.” But she doesn’t want it to die!

What if dying would be the best thing for the animal? What if it has been suffering for days, and would only continue to suffer and die on its own if we don’t euthanize it? The process is quick, if always a bit chilling. I put the animal in the box alive and shut the lid. I turn on the gas. I wait. I turn off the gas. I open the lid and the animal is dead. Not a good experience for me or any of my coworkers, to be sure, but we’re confident in our humane actions. I might be killing, but I am also ending suffering.

If you love animals in more than a bumper sticker way, you need to get comfortable with death. If the animal is irreparably hurt and suffering, if euthanasia is the most humane option, I will do it. At least, if the predators had gotten it, they would have had a meal and recycled the nutrients into the ecosystem. If we euthanize it, it goes in the freezer.

Maybe that’s what’s so important here, the part that people forget in the rush to fear and discomfort with death: we need to recycle. Life on Earth is only able to continue because organic molecules can be recycled from the remains of one dead animal into the body of a new organism. Trite as it may be, in nature death truly is the way to life.

Reviews

[Charlotta Yvonne Smith]

Hm...I can say that this essay is pretty insightful. Death is a part of the life cycle but then again, what if the death has a time and a place? But I understand what you mean. Though I do condemn killing or slaughtering quiet honestly.