I killed something today.
Last night, while I was on the train trip from Hell, my cat found a young rabbit. My wife was home and managed to prevent the half-feral asshole from killing it in the house and put it in a quiet spot in the yard; hoping for the best.
This morning it was still breathbg.
She had to leave early but asked me to handle it. I tried giving it some water with a straw, and I didn’t see any obvious injury, but he laid there breathing hard.
So I put on my welding gloves and got a plastic grocery bag. I gently picked it up and cradled it in the bag until it stopped moving.
I am a monster. Hate me.
59 replies
It really sucks when you have to be the one to finish something like that.
You're not alone. It was mercy.
It was a mercy. It sucks it had to happen. But nothing so innocent should suffer so.
I'm not saying you did anything wrong, and good on you for ending it's pain but blunt force trauma is a much quicker and more humane dispatch method. I've lived in the country so have had to do it a few times.
When I was 16 I killed a bird, a nestling really. I googled how to give it food - I needed to mill some seeds with water into a paste and administer with a syringe. The syringe slipped and the paste went into its throat. It choked to death in my hands. Ever since once a year this episode gives me nightmares. In these nightmares I am a little chick who is choking.
You're not a monster. You painlessly killed an animal that would've died of pain.
But you were trying to do something good. I don't think you deserve those nightmares
Sometimes the greatest gift in life is death.
All things die, even the rabbit knows this.
Do not dispair.
This became problematic for me with a mouse trap in the same way. Thing is I learned by lesson with poison when a mouse died in an inobvious location.
You did something. Most would do nothing, or, at the very least, check every so often and hope it's either dead or gone.
My parents turned up at our house with an injured bird they found on the side of the road once, looking it over, it was in a very bad way and wouldn't survive, it wasn't fun but I put it out of it's misery.
You minimized that creature's suffering. That you feel how you do is evidence contrary to your assertion. You did your best in a shitty situation, and I could only be proud of person who did so. Sad. Empathetic. But proud.
I hope you consider keeping your cat in the house after this. House cats are an invasive species that absolutely devastate (and, on an individual level, torture) local wildlife for literally no reason. I know you didn't mean to do this, but the rabbit nonetheless suffered horribly and died because you or someone in your household let "the half-feral asshole" be outside the house; I hope you recognize going forward that you have the agency to make sure it doesn't happen again.
You're not a monster; I don't hate you. Your reaction shows you care, and I hope your future decisions reflect that.
(I could be misreading this, but the way I interpreted it is that the cat dragged the rabbit in from outside. If the rabbit wandered in the house, obviously disregard this.)
So basically I think you are right about keeping cats inside only, but if a cat has been an outside cat their entire life it is kind of cruel on them too. They will also just be the extra amount of asshole to complain about it. So I'd say, next cat needs to be an inside cat but if you have one that is very used to going out, I'd understand not doing that.
Saying this as an owner of an inside only cat.
No, it is not. They'll get used to it, and they'll statistically have considerably better health outcomes. Moreover, being blunt, it isn't your prerogative to send out your little monster to terrorize and slaughter local wildlife as their plaything because you think they'll be bored or cranky.
Even granting based on nothing that this won't ever change, that's your responsibility to deal with as a pet owner. You created the problem; you can deal with the consequences without making it everybody else's problem. If my aggressive dog is upset he can't go chase my neighbor's dog around their yard, the answer isn't "fuck it, just let him out; I can't deal with his complaining, and frankly it's pretty cruel to keep him cooped up when he's like this."
I'm sad this happened to you, but people keep cats as pets to rid the place of rodents. Your cat probably does this on the regular, and showed you this one because it was extra proud of it.
We had rehabbed a century old house from the Addams family house to a museum piece, only to have a mouse breakout happen in our yard. Then they started to get in the house, and that was a serious problem. I tried traps, but I could literally set 10 around the back steps, and in an hour they would all be sprung, with about half of them with a dead mouse.
He were starting worry about it, when a stray cat showed up at our house, and decided it was a nice place, with nice people, and the added bonus of a yard full of mice to kill. Fun!
He was such a sweet guy, but he had the heart of serial killer. Within a couple of weeks, we weren't seeing any mice, and I couldn't walk across the backyeard without finding a headless mouse corpse. After he had things under control, he decided the place was good enough now, and invited his beautiful Siamese girlfriend and their three kittens to live with us. No humans were consulted in any of these decisions.
So if you've got mice around your house, a cat is your very best extermination strategy.
Cat Distribution System working as intended.
You’re not a monster. I’m sorry you had to do that.
Last week I went out the front door to grab the mail and was treated to the vision of a dismembered bunny corpse lying in our front yard. Crow, maybe?
I turned around, grabbed a plastic bag, picked up the body, threw it away, and never said a word to my family.
It's hard, sometimes, and lonely. But we're here. You're not alone.
Also, it sucks.
RFK, Jr would have seen lunch.
It could be a coyote, fox, or hawk also. Lots of predators city people seldom see living around you.
No guts anywhere around, so hawk is possible, but I think anything land-bound would have had to leave a trail.
You might be surprised how light ground predators can be, especially on a lawn.
I found a wounded squirrel lying on a walk path a few years back. I first thought it was already dead but upon closer inspection it was still breathing. I didn't see any visible injuries so I have no idea what had happened to it.
I carried it into the forest, placed it on a stump and crushed its head with a large stick. It was as quick as it can be and I think I did the right thing but god damn I felt shitty about it for multiple days after. Red squirrels are my favorite wild animals around here. I just hate having to be the one who has to make the decision to end a life. I don't feel like it's mine to make.
I have an old pet gerbil too and I often wonder what I'd do if something happened all of a sudden and it was obvious it's in a lot of pain and needs to be put down quickly. The quick way is to just slam it onto the ground at full force but holy fuck I don't even want to think about having to do that. The alternative is a fabric bag tied around my truck's exhaust but those are some really uncomfortable final minutes. An enclosed container and a bottle of nitrogen would be the ideal method I believe. That leads to loss of consciousness and suffocation without the sense of suffocating (which is triggered by excess carbon dioxide).
In my truck I carry a hatchet for just this reason. A friend had to strangle a dying racoon once because they didn't have anything to hit it with.
i am absolutely fucking sure I am not doing any of this
don't know why you put yourself thru this given that, apparently, you hate it too
I hate leaving a dying animal to suffer even more than I hate ending that suffering.
Hey man, that's really rough. You did the humane thing and ended its suffering.
You are not a monster
You are not a monster
You are not a monster
I’ve had to do similar before. When I was 16 I was learning to drive with a friend’s dad out in rural Australia. There were a bunch of ducks crossing the road at one point; I stopped to let them pass, but after they moved on and I started rolling forwards one duck turned around and tried to attack the car, resulting in me hitting it. I couldn’t even look out the rear view mirror at it but my friend’s dad did, and told me it was still alive but very mangled. He gently told me to reverse back over it and keep on driving, which I did, and then we drove in silence for the next fifteen minutes.
I felt absolutely awful about it (and still do, despite it happening almost 2 decades ago) but I know that leaving it in the road dying slowly would have been a far worse fate.
I hope you take some solace in the fact that you did the right, albeit difficult, thing for that rabbit.
I believe our purpose is to do the best we can in the environment around ourselves. The place we can make significant change. So that usually means your house, land and community.
Sometimes being a shepherd of your local area requires you to make hard choices like that. The bad thing to do would be leave the rabbit to suffer. You did the right thing.
The real monsters are the ones who either hurt animals for fun, or hunt them but suck at it so now there's an injured creature in the wild who will hurt until a predator manages to find them and end the suffering.
You did what you could with what you had. Sounds like it went as peacefully as possible. And for what it's worth, it left maybe knowing someone was there with it trying to help. Probably not, but maybe.
That sucks. Years ago, I had a single small mouse somehow make it into my upper-floor apartment and get caught in a glue trap.
::: spoiler Spoiler I crushed its skull with a bottle. :::
Not fun, especially for an animal lover, but a pretty fast and humane end, considering limited options on-hand...
Avoid glue traps. Snap traps are the best unless you have a huge infestation.
Absolutely. But if you have to use capture/glue traps, please do the humane thing and put them out of their misery (or release them elsewhere). Don't let them slowly starve to death...
It's much more grusome but if you can hack it, a shovel to the head is quicker and less painful than suffocation.
I considered that and chickened out
It's fair, a bad swing and you'll feel even worse.
I wished I had my old air rifle. That would have been quick and clean
I put down a mouse in similar shape, but used a hatchet and hammer and made as quick a cut as I could. It's just not fun but the right thing to do.
You ended its suffering. You're the opposite of a monster.
That was the best thing you could have done for it. Leaving it alone out there would make you a monster.
Been exactly there. Our cat pulled a juvenile bunny into the house and I was able to get it away from her, but the damage was done. Don't dwell on it. You did what had to be done and it was the right thing.
I wish she'd stick to the pocket gophers and mice.
I feel you. Been there. Sympathize.
What I notice is humans generally feel bad when hurting an animal, but that thought disappears when it comes in plastic wrap at the grocery store. We are an odd society
Humans are capable of both empathy and reason.
As humans, we all largely have a strong will to live and we can empathize with other creatures in that regard.
Reason kicks in at the grocery store. I’m not going to argue the ethics of eating meat here but humans can stand in the grocery store and understand both that they did not kill the animal wrapped in plastic, and that not buying it does not bring the animal back.
The "and not buying it does not bring the animal back" is poor reasoning.
A good Reasoner at the store would know if they and others stopped buying it the store would stop stocking it, and the farm would stop shipping them, and less animal count on the farm etc.
You are assuming those people don’t want to eat meat. It seems like you’re assigning them an ethical or moral value (that you possess?) that would affect their reasoning whether the meat was present or not.
Meat in the US is highly subsidized and culturally relevant. Without a massive coordinated effort a boycott would not help. Unlikely in a country like the US given its size and difficulty coordinating across such a large area.
You’re forgetting how absolutely wasteful most American grocery chains are. They’d throw away or mark down 100s of pounds of meat before they’d stop stocking it at all.
Reduction in meat consumption should come through removal of subsidies, restricting where and how much land can be used for growing feed crops and, arguably most important, reducing to a point of elimination the amount of intensive factory farming of animals.
No I'm assuming those people would have empathy for say a cow the same as a rabbit. And not reason, well I didn't kill it so it's fine.
I realize that culturally meat is ingrained into the USA. To an extreme level of a guy once saying to me "I don't eat veggie burgers cuz I ain't no removed” LOL
But we were talking about reasoning. A person with good reasoning skills would know that factory farmed meat is really a life of suffering --even if they didn't kill it-- and maybe choose hunting to bring meat to the table.
Not a cow, a piece of a cow.
Based on what? The massive amount of suffering people are aware of for other people all around the world and do nothing about?
I think you need to stop applying your own bias and start meeting people where they’re at.
I’ve raised chickens and pigs and don’t mind eating them. But a poor little hurt bunny is different.
to be fair rabbits are a common thing raised for food. not one of the big three but up there.
I think it would have been easier if it was fully grown
Bunny didn't deserve suffocation, it only needed a quick boop on the head 🐇🔨
It's fine mate, but fuck cats. And before someone says it, indoor cats aren't the solution, they need exercise or they get sick of random shit. The answer is no cats period
cats can live in doors their whole life healthy and fine and live a long assed life.
You are a monster, but only because you let your cat out.
Rabbits (and small prey animals in general) try to hide their injuries. Rabbits are basically as much lean muscle as nature can fit on the lightest and most delicate skeleton, they can snap their own spines from the momentum of their hind legs if they kick against the air hard enough. This animal probably had a debilitating injury, and you saved it from being another cat's torture puppet for a few hours, or from dying of exposure over the next few days.
If you feel really bad about what happened, keep your car indoors. There are plenty of rabbits out in the wild, and you cat will get another one, and you'll need to do this again and again.
Rabbit taste like chicken. As society starts to fall apart further it will be
anyways the children in gaza
Rabbit doesn't taste anything like chicken.
You’re right. I’m not as big of a monster as Netanyahu