I was consistently disturbed by the way I saw my step dad treat animals.
Kittens
“Come out here with me.”
I followed him, summer-barefoot through our back yard, to the border of the hay field where a small hole was dug. In it was a shoe box with four kittens, barely old enough to stumble over each other.
He raised his shot gun and with two shots killed them all. He handed me the hot gun to hold while he buried them.
A family friend couldn’t take on the four new kittens that came from her recently knocked up mamma cat. So she asked my step dad for the favor of taking them off her hands.
Fish
When fishing, I always felt bad when the hook got caught deep in their mouth. I’d try to gently remove it, even while the fish was slippery and the fins sharp in my hand.
My step dad would rip the line and hook out, no matter how much of the inside of the fish came with it, and no matter if he was going to throw a too-small fish back in.
Our dumb dog
We had a dumb dog. He nearly died as a runt puppy, getting lost in the dewy grass. He got hit while chasing a car and healed in a cast for months. He maneuvered around the house like a drunk bumper car.
One day he disappeared, as often our dogs did. Neighboring farmers who saw wandering dogs on their property would just shoot them. That was the law of the land.
Turns out it wasn’t a neighboring farmer this time. My step dad was just tired of him. So he took him in the woods and shot him.
Raccoon
My step dad’s mother lived across the street. She had a small barn of chickens and rabbits that she raised to butcher, for her own eating and to sell.
Country predators sometimes got through the fence and burrowed under walls, killing some of her animals.
My step dad set traps. And they worked.
“I caught a opossum and a raccoon trying to get into my ma’s chickens. Want to see?”
“Sure.”
He seemed to be in a good mood and I was curious.
When we reached her barn, to my surprise, I saw them, in the cage, staring back at me. For some reason I assumed it was the kind of trap that killed them.
He put the barrel of the gun through the cage, pointed at the head of the raccoon, and shot it dead.
That was the clearest I ever stared the end of life in the face.
I’d seen fish and birds killed, but seeing a mammal, something I could recognize emotions on, twisted a knife in my empathy.
It made me think of our dogs, whom I loved, our cats, my mom, my sister, my grandparents, myself- even the raccoon… And of us standing on a cliff over the edge of nothingness, and the end of a very short life. It it was hart breaking.
It disturbed me to see my step dad wield the power to take that away. And so offhandedly. No hesitation and definitely no remorse.
I ran home, crying. Disturbed down to my gut. I felt sick and mortal.
Dog
We adopted a dog from a friend who was moving. We only had her for a couple of months when she was hit by a car and killed.
“Boy, I want you to go get the dog and bury her.”
I laid the scooping shovel over the wheel barrow and maneuvered it down our country gravel road to where the next country gravel road came to a tee on ours.
I set down the wheel barrow and looked at her. Dead. I wedged the shovel under her and lifted her into the wheel barrow. She was heavy and it was disturbing.
Both seeing this happy creature without her life, and also knowing, even at nine, this adult, who acted so fucking tough, was making me do his job, because he didn’t want to face it.
Deer
He was an avid hunter. And good at it. There was never a year he didn’t come home with at least deer.
I treasured the week he was gone up north deer hunting each fall. I could finally relax in my home.
One year when he came back, he called me outside to the back yard where his dead deer hung by its feet from our clothes line pole.
Like an unzipped jacket, it’s middle was cut open, from where colors and shapes were darker and redder than its fur, were visible.
“Come here. Come closer. I’m dressing the deer. I drain it’s blood and pull out the guts.”
He reaches into the center of its chest with his hand and knife, pulls out its slick, red, and wet heart.
“Want to hold it?”
Want to hold it? As if it were a cute kitten or cool hunk of rock with glittering chunks of gold.
No. No I do not want to hold it. Why would he think I want to hold it? What in the nine years he has known me, would tell him I would have any interest in it? Why does he want to touch it?
Actually, I get it. He grew up on a farm, hunted as a kid- maybe with even his dad. He was actually trying to share something with me.
But still, it disturbed me to see how caluse he was. Nowhere in him was the burden of thinking about this animal’s life. The fear and pain it must have felt.
It disturbed me because he seemed just as unaware of how his actions effected me. My fear and pain was not a burden to him.
This week I watched a video of a family Thanksgiving at my grandparents from when I was 15.
In it, my step dad went on and on about hunting to the busy camera operator, my uncle, who, no one on earth would think would give a shit about hunting.
He talked about over population of deer, how they were damaging crops, and how the permits changed that year increasing the number of deer a hunter can kill per year.
“As far as the ‘Bambi syndrome’, well, if they feel that way, that’s their right to have those feelings, but when their feeling start to intrude upon my rights, that’s where the line has to be drawn.”
I heard him talk about his rights all the time.
Violations of his rights seemed to be the opinions, wants, and needs of anyone other than him. Me being alive seemed like a violation to him. And just like the animals he did what ever he please with, I never felt like I had rights in his eyes.