doing arguable right to feel absolutely all wrong

I have my particular issues with life, as we all do. A constant for me: Why does doing the right thing so often feel like doing exactly the opposite?

I got home from this afternoon’s ill-advised sick-Frank walk in the wilting heat, and was stumbling and coughing and post-nasal-dripping my way through putting up the sprinkler and hose in our back yard, when I spied a squirrel making its way across the grass from near our back fence. Normally, it wouldn’t have registered; we have a lot of the chattering, often scolding little monsters, and our own dogs are so unimpressed by them that the squirrels damn near have full run of everything. I’ve looked up at our sliding glass doors in the morning to see a squirrel standing on its hind legs against the glass, peering in, our goofus beagle-boxer Maggie snoozing just feet away on the carpet.

But this little guy was moving slow, and something in his movements was all wrong. The closer he got, the better I could see that there were flies and gnats flitting on and off his back.

I stopped what I was doing and walked closer, figuring he’d pick up the pace to get away, and he did, slightly. I tried to encourage him up a nearby tall tree, so he wasn’t out in the open, and he might have an opportunity to recover from whatever ailed him. But it was for nought. He made it a few feet up the bark and then sort of fumbled back down. He was panting to beat all.

I realized then that he was badly wounded; most likely the big dog in the yard behind us had nipped him, opening him up pretty good; some of his insides were out, and trailing behind him. My heart just sank.

Because I also realized right then that the little guy was a goner, no hope, no chance. And that I was gonna have to kill him. Because there was no possible improvement in this wretched animal’s future, only more horrifying pain, unto death. He kept moving forward a few feet away from me, and falling flat.

Before I got back with my tools for this unwanted work, he had made it to a plant bed, and was trying to crawl up under our deck, where he would then not only have been suffering unreachable by anyone for who knows how long, but once he died, as he absolutely would, the odor was quickly going to become overwhelming.

There was no possible good outcome in letting him continue on his agonizing course.

So in the ultimate indignity, I was forced to pull the little guy back out, by legs and tail, avoiding as best I could the trailing wound. I doubt my saying I was sorry, so sorry, dude, I’m sorry, was of much value then.

I am a cowardly carnivore, like most of us. I eat meat; I like meat. And I am OK therefore with hunting, if you eat what you kill, so long as you are as humane in the animal’s death as you can be. But any killing of an animal for pure sport — simply because we can, the arrogant Trump boys trophy mentality — goes against ever fiber of my being.

I save snakes from my wife’s wildly irrational fear, taking them to nearby wooded parks; even poisonous ones, once or twice. I have rescued mice from glue traps, and I routinely escort nonpoisonous spiders back outside.

I find the idea loathsome, killing something that is not actively trying to cause me harm, and even then, I would hope to find some other option besides an outstanding wild animal’s death; a grizzly, for instance, is a predator, and it ain’t the animal’s fault for being true to itself (I do loosely, and possibly unfairly, squeeze roaches into this category of causing me harm; sorry, cuz, well, roaches).

I will not share the particulars of how this piteous little creature met his end; I do on not own a gun, so I was forced to improvise, no time to delay, brutal and swift.

And now, no matter that this suffering and terrified creature had nothing but more of the same awaiting it were I to have walked away and let “nature take its course,” I still have no sense that good has been done.

I killed something for, in the broadest sense, no reason. It had to die then, yes; letting it live any longer would have been the epitome of cruel. But like a house cat maiming a songbird, as dear Mr. Whiskers will do when let outside to indulge his instincts in the yard, some human act ultimately made this so.

Too often, some human act makes it so.

And I feel lousy as hell, about every bit of this. And I probably haven’t done much for your own mood, either.

So hey, life, screw you and your intolerable contradictions …

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