Crafter_Man: May I point out that the French perforated even more redcoats?
Anyway, one time when I was working at a printing factory, I started the car and heard a “whumpwhumpwhump” noise. I got out, opened up a hood, and saw that I’d killed a cat that had been hiding under the hood. I couldn’t bear to pick it out myself; I had to find someone else who worked there to retrieve and dispose of the remains. I felt terrible for days.
Rats with big fluffly tails they are! Actually, I come from an area with many squirrels, and have never had problems with them. But they really are EVERYWHERE, and thus I’ve grown immune to their charm.
As for the OP, I live in a wooded area, and have hit my share of squirrels in my days driving around. Also hit a raccoon once, and a deer (which did immense damage to me car, but I don’t know what happened to the deer. It did run off under its own power.
It’s never a nice experience. I always try to slow down and avoid all of the animals, but often it’s impossible. And you always feel bad. The first time was the worst for me, but since then it hasn’t been as bad.
Anyway, on a related story, I was driving near my home with my brother once. He hit a squirrel. For the record, he’s a huge animal lover, and on his way to being a veternarian. Anyway, he stops the car and is looking back, and the squirrel is just twitching in the road. He feels so bad that he goes back and runs it over again so it wouldn’t have to suffer. Very sad moment (though to this day I half think that the twitching was just a reflex).
As a former biomedical researcher I have killed hundreds of animals in the name of science. Rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and frogs. By lethal injection, guillotine, cervical dislocation and gassing. At first I had a queasy feeling about it, but soon I just saw them as tools that were being used for a noble purpose. Care was always taken that the animals died as painlessly and stress-free as possible, and that any animal’s death was not needless.
However, the queasy feeling returned after the birth of my first child and never went away. Something about witnessing the wonders of a new life developing and being brought into the world made me appreciate all life a bit more.
My comment, on which Mhendo is commenting, was “I fish. I love to fish. I feel really good about fishing. And eating the fish I catch. I make no apologies for this whatsoever. Anyone who eats fish (or meat) and objects to fishing or hunting is pretty much in the position of someone who claims to object to murder, and wouldn’t feel comfortable actually killing some inconvenient person, but has no qualms about hiring a hit man to get the job done.”
I was being a bit simplistic, and even flippant, but I’ll stand by what I said. I can’t really see much of a distinction between killing an animal for leather or food and killing an animal for fur. Sure, there’s an element of vanity involved in wearing of fur that (usually) isn’t there with leather, but I’m not sure that there’s a difference. Certainly there’s a moral obligation to “use” (which includes milking, shearing, research, and sometimes killing) animals wisely and carefully. So we’ve given up killing baby seals and whales and species that we’ve determined are endangered.
I mean, using the muscle tissue of an animal as a food source and the hide of an animal as a clothing source don’t seem that different to me. Sure, these days we’ve got really good synthetic insulators and don’t
Sounds like possums here. They are not native to NZ and are ravaging the country. The govt employees people to kill them (yet they are protected in Aus). When we were kids to pass the time while driving we used to play "count the squished possum’ now the sight makes me squiffy.
I really should be a vegetarian cause if I had to kill my own dinner I would starve.
I once drowned a newborn kitten whose hind legs had been chewed off by its mother. (She got a little overenthusiastic while licking off the afterbirth.) I was twenty years old, out in the boonies alone in the middle of the night with no car, and no one close enough to call. I filled the bathroom sink and put the kitten in. This is one of the worst things I have ever done. Now if someone comes along and says it was a bad thing to do, I’m sorry. I’ve cried over it for years.
I killed another kitten by accident. It had just gotten over being ill, and it was eaten up with fleas, so I gave it a bath with some flea soap. It died in convulsions a few minutes later.
Eons ago, when I was a teenager, I went rabbit hunting, and it bothered me that I got one. In my old age, it doesn’t. I haven’t killed anything game hunting since my early 20s, so the safest days the deer and rabbits have are the ones that I’m out looking for them. I’ve plugged lots of vermin, and those are pests.
I once shot a dog that was killing my Dad’s neighbor’s sheep, and that didn’t bother me a bit. Nor did it when I killed an injured cat. I felt sorry for the cat because it was hurt (and I’m someone who despises cats), but not that I put it out of it’s misery.
Just last night.
I was raking the brush out of the garden to place into the spring burn pile.
I uncovered a family of five small mice.
Into the fire they went.
I felt bad after I did it only because I could hear them squeaking as they burned.
However, their other option would have been the mice traps that I have out in the shed or in the garage, so either way they probably would have met a similar fate. They can really rip through a bag of grass or bird seed. Not to mention they shit up the place when they eat.
I hit a rabbit while driving a couple weeks back. I felt guilty for a minute, until my passenger pointed out how many accidents are caused by people swerving to miss animals.
My next thought was about getting the mess off the front bumper, but when I got home there wasn’t any. Maybe I just stunned him after all.
I’ve done my share of fishing, so I’ve definitely killed fish. In fact, the last time I fished was with a nun. We were on the beach, pretty far back from the surf as she never learned to swim and the waves were moderately high. We were trying to catch needlefish, long wriggly jobs with a needle-like point to their heads. I think I got the first needlefish and Sister wrenched it off the hook and beat it to death against a plastic bucket. Then she got a pliers out and ripped out its tongue, telling me, “It’s the best bait for them.” She took the fish home and gave them to some of her patients.
The only animal I’ve killed deliberately apart from fishing was a crab. I know, it’s not all that dramatic, and not all that far removed from an insect. I was probably about nine or ten and was digging up ghost crabs on the beach. I found a pretty good sized one, and for no reason at all flung it at a seawall. It hit the wall with a crunch and fell to the sand. I crouched down next to it and watched it twitch until it stopped, and then I threw it into the ocean. I can’t remember feeling anything about it apart from curiosity, but I did have the feeling later that it was a pretty senseless thing to do.
So may rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels and deer that I couldn’t begin to keep track. Killed them with guns and also archery. A heap of feral/stray cats. Nearly as many feral/stray dogs.
I wouldn’t know where to begin on the vermin like rats and mice. Trapped them, poisoned them, shot them, fed them to snakes. On two memorable occassions, I beat specimens of rattus norvegicus to death. Once when I was awakened by one chewing on the toe of my boot, the other time when I saw one scuttle across the floor in a house inhabited by small children.
Slaughtered and butchered domestic farm animals lots of times. The only memorable ones were when I lived in Texas. Slaughtered goats and kids there but did the actual killing by cutting the throat. When all those blood vessels and the windpipe are severed, it’s really surprising how quickly the animal expires. Messy though, and it makes it easier if you stun the animal with a good hammer blow to the skull first.
I don’t recall feeling any particular way during any of this.
In the course of driving, I offed two birds, a deer, and a cat. Felt pretty bad about all of them, especially the cat – it was an upscale residential area, and likely somebody’s pet rather than a feral animal.
We raise and kill our organic pastured chickens.
I (rationally) have no problem with the whole food cycle and I know that our chicken have a good life before they die but I still feel a little queasy every time we start the process again.
By time I’ve gutted my 20th chicken for the day I’m so over any remorse about the process.
I once hit a squirrel accidently and actually got out of the car with the thought of giving the little guy CPR.
Then I realized that I was being a bigger nutjob than I usually am-mouth to mouth on a squirrel. :smack:
What annoys the piddle out of me are the meat eaters who, when told that we kill our own chickens, squeal ''Oh I could never do that."
Right, well I hope you never get really hungry then.
Lots of fish, including a 60ish lb. yellowfin tuna. All fish eaten. Yum!
Several mice in traps in our house. Mostly killed in the traps, but I did step on one that was still moving.
Caught a squirrel in a have-a-heart trap in the attic once. Drowned it in a wheelbarrow full of water.
No remorse on any of these - they were all either food or pests (or both I guess, if you use Cecil’s squirrel recipe). If I ran over someone’s pet, I’d feel bad mostly because the owner would be upset.
I’ve killed a few mice and squirrels that were problem pests and doing damage to a home.
Have shot dove, duck, turkey, deer and antelope, all according to the rules of the F&G comission and all with a license.
How did I feel about it? A short while later… full.
[old joke alert]
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To prove to the possum that it could be done.
Last year a rabbit ran in front of my car. There was a car coming from the other direction, so I had no choice but to keep driving straight. I could hear the bones crack (open window) as it apparently bounced over my tire into the wheel well. I felt pretty bad, especially with the added sound effects, but not as bad as I would having a head-on collision to avoid hitting it in the first place.
One time I was driving on the Taconic State Parkway in NY, and I had my canoe strapped to portable roof racks on my car. Driving under an overpass, a pigeon swooped down in front of my car. I was doing about 65 MPH. That pigeon got caught between the edge of the canoe and the front roof rack, right there by my driver’s side window. I had to go another five miles before I found a place to pull over, all the while with a dead pigeon’s wing flapping against the glass next to my face, blood streaming down everywhere. It was a friggin’ mess. Yeah, I felt bad, even for a dopey pigeon.
I’m one of those people who puts spiders outside rather than killing them. I ran over a squirrel once and felt terrible about it.
What I feel even more terrible about, though, is that I killed my pet rat. At the time I couldn’t think of anything else to do, but I still feel bad about it. We had two and both were getting pretty old (they were almost three). One died of natural causes. The other one held on for a couple more weeks, but after we returned from a vacation (we had a very attentive rat-sitter) she wasn’t doing so well. One Saturday we came home and found her at the bottom of the cage, twitching and unable to stand up, so we knew the end was near. I took her out of the cage, wrapped her in a washcloth and held her in my lap, hoping she would slip peacefully away, but she kept on twitching. There was no vet open on a Saturday and I didn’t want to do anything violent to her (she was a sweet rat and I wanted her to have a peaceful end) so the solution I arrived at was to wrap her up gently, put her in a shoebox, and put the shoebox in the freezer. I guess I had the idea that she would just slip away like people do when they die in blizzards. At the time I felt okay about it, but then later I found out that this isn’t a particularly pleasant way to die. It still haunts me that I might have made her suffer needlessly, but there’s no way I could have hit her over the head or drowned her. I hope she can forgive me. 
Hah! I laugh at your measly 60 lb tuna! God I wish I had a picture of me with that 300 lb Halibut I killed last summer - it wasn’t quite as big asthis one but it was huge. I had to wrestle with it and hold it down while the murder took place - something I don’t feel too confident about doing when killing sharks.
Actually, come to think of it, I quite enjoy killing some animals. Several animals, in fact. How some of you feel so bad about killing vermin and injured animals is beyond me, but to each his own, I suppose. Oh, and don’t drown injured animals - that takes a while and doesn’t sound very…well… humane to me. The breaking of the neck is usually easier, faster and (hopefully) less painful. Does that make me sound heartless?
I ran over a frog once and a bird flew into my car. I didn’t hit them on purpose but I kind of felt bad about it.
I’ve caught, killed, and eaten tons and tons of fish. I’ve been fishing since I could walk and it’s one of my favorite past times. We take our kids bait fishing with us and they catch the perch for our bank lines. Those are really easy for the kids to catch and they get a kick out of it!
My husband is also a hunter and shoots turkey, rabbit, pheasant, deer, and dove and we eat everything he kills. Our freezer is stocked with wild game and fish.
We also order a hog every year too. Does that count? We call the people up and tell them to fatten one up for us and butcher it and we’ll come pick it up when it’s ready.
Grew up hunting and fishing with my grandfather, father, brothers, uncles, and assorted friends.
I’ve hunted, shot, cleaned, cooked and eaten deer, squirrels, rabbits, dove, quail, pheasant, woodcock, ducks, geese and all sorts of fresh and saltwater fish. I’ve also participated in the butchering of cattle.
