Murder Musings

A few nights ago my hands were sticky with the blood of a very young rabbit. Slurry had left the kit's cooling body right in front of our middle door and did his strange calls to let us know. There are few things cuter than a young rabbit, it easily fits into the cup of one hand.



Slurry was seated on a couch, flicking his tail with a confidence that bordered on arrogance, this earned him a flick on the ear from Steph and so he sulked for the next few hours but everything was fine by morning. How can you hold a cat responsible for its predatory instincts? A majority of rabbits do not survive their first year - they are the key mammalian prey species in our ecosystem, how can you mourn a predator killing prey?

Cat ownership and rural life in general keeps you close to the sheer amount of murder that nature runs on. I handle 20+ dead rodents a year from cat kills, one walking trail still has the feather remains of where a fox killed a grouse, I watched a grouse die in front of me last year, every winter I see a flecks of blood beside feather prints or where a fox stuck it's nose in the snow, I watch fox prints overlap rabbit prints in their endless game of hide & seek, the hawk that tried to eat a grackle in front on me was back again this year. People keep their suppers penned in their front yards, fall walks reveal bear and coyote/wolf carcasses that hunters have field-dressed, dragonflies snatch moths to nonchalantly eat them head-first on branches beside you. A single sheep killed for a meal on Manitoulin Island left an epic clean-up to avoid having the rest of the carcass become a waste hazard.

There is a constant trickle of killing to remind of the true nature of this world. A reminder of what the packaging on a cat food can wants you to forget. Predators live by murder.

This rural trickle of murder is strangely paralleled by my job. The first few years of teaching criminology/sociology the subject matter didn't really sink in. A decade of that stuff does make you think. War and the media propaganda that allow it, 600 Canadian homicide a year, the hidden figure of workplace fatalities, suicide and disease...

Enough people want to see death, to see the 'hardcore' reality behind the endless media portrayals of it, so they join the police or military, but the tricky part is that death is very banal, nothing supernatural or religious occurs. Some murders are exciting as they occur, but the aftermath is banal and many murders are boring in themselves. Even 'exciting' murders are usually committed for pathetic reasons like revenging humiliation or national security. I've read enough murder cases to know that the post-murder blues is akin to the male post-orgasm comedown. For those murders committed in cold-blood by drones or gang enforcers, it's just biology, the term drone operators use is 'bug splat'.

I carried that baby rabbit out to this evergreen where I place all the rodents killed by the cats I have brought here and lightly bury it near the roots. Has the local fox learnt my pattern and check that spot to scavenge a quick snack? I don't know but I have never seen fox prints there and even if it did, how could you blame the fox? That tree and that ritual are for me. After I bury the kit I look up the tree to the night sky and salute its brief life. It is the same salute I give every time I pass a roadkill'd animal. An acknowledgement of a life gone.

Animals murdering animal just is. Human murdering human is just tragedy. The line between human and animal is blurry so too is the nature of murder. All I can perceive is that killing is one of the foundations of our evolutionary/biological reality and that it is my privilege as a human to question that foundation.