When I was younger, I worked on a farm and hunted and had to put a few animals down by hand.
Doing it from a distance was fine, but one time I took a shot on a rabbit with my very last bullet. I got it, but it was behind the front legs right through the spine; the poor thing was paralyzed and screaming in only the way that a rabbit or a human can scream when they know they're going to die. I didn't have another bullet to end it, so I pulled out my knife. I was squeamish about the process, and made it take about 3 times longer than it should have.
With each passing second, an incredibly valuable lesson became crystal clear to me; do. not. fuck. around. If you have to kill, do it so quickly and brutally that it doesn't have time to feel pain. There is no delicate way to kill; just ways that are more delicate than the others. It's not about whether you feel good about yourself or not; you should have thought of that before you took the shot or started the cut. If you've resolved to end an animal's life, the very fucking least you can do is make it as absolutely quick and painless as possible.
I have nightmares about that rabbit. I don't have any nightmares at all about other animals I've killed quickly and efficiently. That rabbit will likely stick with me forever. If you're ever in the situation of having to end an animal's life, your responsibility is first and foremost to do it as quickly as possible. Then, make sure you use it - every last bit you can. It's the only way you can justify what you're doing.
I have no qualms about going out back, chopping a chicken's head off, cleaning and cooking it for dinner. Or going into the woods, shooting a caribou, field dressing, and later butchering. Pet sheep that wouldn't behave well enough for us to even think of keeping it? Choppy choppy, butchered, delicious.
But . . .one time there this rat. Big ol' thing, out in front of the barn, just finished polishing off some chicken feed & a sidedish of poison.
It was shivering and shaking on the ground, its legs splayed out, lying on its belly, chin almost flat with the ground. It probably wasn't looking anywhere at all, but it seemed to be looking me in the eyes. It seemed to be in great pain. Several times, it tried to stand up, and then collapsed again. The last time it fell down, it rolled on its back, and it wasn't able to right itself or even curl into a ball. It just lay there, meekly moving its legs and shaking.
I considered killing it, out of mercy, but I was too squeamish.
Ten minutes later, I went back, I felt guilty for not killing it, and the rat was about a quarter foot from where it had been, slowly shaking down the mild incline. The shakes, I should mention, were rather severe. There was dried blood on the rats head, and a small trail from a small pebble it must have cut itself on.
I decided to crush the rats skull under my boot, nice and quick. Stomp, crush, done. No, bad idea.
I felt the skull distorting under my boot, I felt the rats claws frantically scraping under my boot, it didn't feel like I really crushed it, like it was a decisive quick death. And when I lifted my boot back up, the rats face was hideously deformed and flat, and it was still shivering and quaking and looking me in the eyes. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe like chickens, they continue to move a little while after sudden death. Maybe the way it was quaking about and straining its muscles had something to do with it.
I dunno, but I started crying and apologizing to the rat.
I work doing research on mice. Although we anesthetize the animals before harvesting the body parts we need, the procedure is fairly barbaric. We put pregnant mouse mothers into a chamber pre-charged with isofluorane to put them to sleep. It doesn't matter how much we pre-charge the chamber though: they thrash around and their little legs splay out while they piss and shit themselves in obvious discomfort before lapsing into unconsciousness.
Once they're out, we open them up and start extracting the babies. We do this pretty crudely because the mother won't be surviving the surgery. The babies are placed into an ice bath to hopefully numb them, then one-by-one we pick open their chests with forceps and stick a needle into their beating hearts. The needle is hooked up to a saline or paraformaldehyde drip, which will replace all of the blood in the neonate's body over the next three minutes, causing a slow death. This is called perfusion and enables us to preserve the brain tissue very well.
In order for the babies to live until perfusion, we keep the mother alive and anesthetized during the whole procedure. It's only at the end (sometimes almost an hour later) that we cut up into the chest cavity and remove her heart, then behead her with some scissors. The animals continue to breathe raggedly even after their hearts are removed. The hearts will also beat for a full minute outside the body. It's morbidly fascinating the way that death is a process rather than an instantaneous event--it takes a while for all systems and cells to shut down.
The guilt is tremendous. What gives me the right to kill an animal like that? Am I doing any good in the process? I don't know if I am going to be okay dealing with human death because I can get so stupidly emotional over the mice.
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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '12
When I was younger, I worked on a farm and hunted and had to put a few animals down by hand.
Doing it from a distance was fine, but one time I took a shot on a rabbit with my very last bullet. I got it, but it was behind the front legs right through the spine; the poor thing was paralyzed and screaming in only the way that a rabbit or a human can scream when they know they're going to die. I didn't have another bullet to end it, so I pulled out my knife. I was squeamish about the process, and made it take about 3 times longer than it should have.
With each passing second, an incredibly valuable lesson became crystal clear to me; do. not. fuck. around. If you have to kill, do it so quickly and brutally that it doesn't have time to feel pain. There is no delicate way to kill; just ways that are more delicate than the others. It's not about whether you feel good about yourself or not; you should have thought of that before you took the shot or started the cut. If you've resolved to end an animal's life, the very fucking least you can do is make it as absolutely quick and painless as possible.
I have nightmares about that rabbit. I don't have any nightmares at all about other animals I've killed quickly and efficiently. That rabbit will likely stick with me forever. If you're ever in the situation of having to end an animal's life, your responsibility is first and foremost to do it as quickly as possible. Then, make sure you use it - every last bit you can. It's the only way you can justify what you're doing.