The Scene: I'm outside with the dogs this afternoon. I'm sitting in a lawn chair and Sam is busy bringing me his tennis ball so I can throw it to the other side of the yard so he can bring me his tennis ball so I can throw it to the other side of the yard so he can bring me his... (you get the idea) for about the 487th time today. Marisol is wandering around sniffing everything as if it has somehow changed, yet again, since she was out 3 hours earlier. She's also spending a fair amount of time, as usual, looking through all of the fences. There's chain link around one side and the back while the other side is mostly a tall, wooden privacy fence with a section near the house that's made up of narrow slats so you can see the side yard when you're sitting on the deck.
Suddenly I hear the unmistakable sound of dog hitting the ground from a bit of a height. I turn around to see Marisol on the ground in the side yard, regaining her footing and making a b-line toward the side of our house. Now she either fit through the slats in the fence (which I would've bet money was impossible when comparing the size of the dog to the size of the slats) and jumped about 3 or 4 feet to the ground or she went over the fence (it's about 3' tall) and landed 6 or 7 feet below. If I had to guess I'd pick "through the fence" but I can't rule either option totally out.
What she's making a b-line toward is this little rabbit who lives under our deck. I first noticed him when we got back from Buffalo a couple weeks ago and he was just a tiny thing. He's now up to a respectable "small". He's started to get pretty comfortable with me being around and even let me walk right past him while he was sitting and eating clover. He kinda paused for a minute, said, "Oh, it's just you." and went on nibbling.
Well, the bunny heads for the safety of the under part of the deck which is protected by some lattice boards that the dog can't get through.
The bunny didn't make it.
Marisol grabbed the bun-bun in her mouth and shook him a bit. I'm yelling at her to drop it which, after what seemed like forever but was probably 2 seconds, she finally did. I open the gate, run down the stairs, grab Miss Deathfangs, and shove her ass back into the backyard.
But she didn't kill the bunny. She had just broken his back legs. One leg was trying to shuffle itself along and the other just dragged along behind at this sickening angle. He crawled the last foot or so to the safety of the lattice. He was in rough shape. His front end looked fine. His paws were going, his eyes were bright; if you had only seen the front 4" of him you'd never have known anything was wrong. But his back end was, in my medical opinion, really fucked up.
What was I to do? How many options are there, really? Clearly, he wasn't gonna make it. He probably wasn't going to die in the next day, maybe not for a few days, but even if he could drag himself back out to eat, sooner or later (probably sooner) it was going to do him in.
So I cut his head off with a shovel, turned away as his decapitated body made its final kicks, and threw him into the ravine with the same shovel that ended his life.
You just shouldn't have to do shit like that. Or at least I shouldn't.
Fucking dog.
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7 comments:
And you should warn people like me so I don't have to read shit like that.
That's hard. Right, but hard. My sympathy.
(I wonder what if it means something that my word verification text this time is "eoskrapo")
you did the only thing that was really humane and ended his life quickly and with compassion. it's a very hard choice to have to make and a hard decision to follow through on.
zoe: Yeah, sorry about that.
deathboy: Having to do in the little bunny pretty much put the "krap" in "eoskrapo".
dykewife: I know, I know. If both of his back legs had still be working I might've given him a day to see if he was just stunned or just a little hurt but that back left one... man.
Zoe (and other squeemish types), you may want to skip this last part:
The hardest part about the following through on what I knew had to be done was deciding which tool to use. I wanted to be sure I took care of the job in one quick shot. I got out an ax, a shovel and a sledgehammer. I decided my aim wasn't true enough to try the ax and the ground might be too soft for the sledgehammer. Every tool I grabbed just filled my head with images of what might happen if I didn't kill the bunny instantly. Fortunately the shovel worked as planned.
It still sucked.
You may recall I wrote about having to finish off a raccoon my wife had hit with a car a few months back. It truly sucks, but it's far more humane than letting them suffer.
You should have let the dog finish the bunny the way nature intended.
You're one of the first Google results for Rowsby Woof. I saw a random picture of a dog's nose up close and on impulse decided to google that.
I've never had to finish off a wounded animal, but when I was younger I sometimes had gory nightmares where I would have to do something like that. And I once saw somebody's cat die right after it got hit by a car, but it was lucky to die quickly. It makes you feel guilty and horrible, and at the same time, letting them live and suffer would be just as bad or worse.
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