The flayed rabbit

This is how I feel a lot these days:

Yesterday I came home to find a number of clumps of fur on the carpet. Last summer the cat brought home voles and chipmunks on a regular basis, so I thought I would find either a dead or hiding chipmunk with some chunks torn out of its tail. No big problem. The dead prey always seemed to have been killed cleanly, and the live ones were usually in good enough shape to run away once I caught them and tossed them out the window.

There was something with big eyes hiding under the fridge. I grabbed a pair of rubber gloves and told Steve to shut the cat in the bathroom so I could prod it out with a stick. I still thought it was a squirrel until the edge of an elongated ear appeared, but something still seemed wrong after it was identifiably a bunny, a baby rabbit about five inches long.

Half the skin had been flayed off its back.

I have no idea how many hours it crouched under there, terrified, suffering with every movement of air on its skinless flesh. As it hopped miserably to the wall below the window, I could see that the muscles over its left shoulder were torn. Steve came up behind me. "Should I take it to the vet school or kill it?" I asked, almost more for rhetoric than anything else. "Kill it," he said. "There's no way it can live like that." I sent him outside for a stick while I crouched over the bleeding animal in my designer tights, covering its face to keep it calm.

Steve opened the window from the outside and handed me a short piece of half-inch-thick branch. "Shh, bunny," I whispered, laying the stick down on its neck. It wriggled a bit as I took hold of the hind legs, but didn't struggle too much since I wasn't touching the agonized skinned flesh. Grasping the legs firmly, I pulled straight back while pressing the stick down with my other hand.

You can feel several small things snapping when you do that, the ligaments holding skull to spine. The bunny convulsed, kicking out those big hind feet that hadn't been fast enough to keep it away from Lina. It flopped a few inches across the floor. Worried that I hadn't broken its neck properly, I caught it and pulled with the stick again, and felt more ligaments break. The head flopped freely from the body, and after a few moments, it stopped kicking. And breathing

Of cervical dislocation, the AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia have this to say on its downsides:

Disadvantages—(1) Cervical dislocation may be aesthetically displeasing to personnel. (2) Cervical dislocation requires mastering technical skills to ensure loss of consciousness is rapidly induced. (3) Its use is limited to poultry, other small birds, mice, and immature rats and rabbits.

By the book, then.

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It's thrown me into a tailspin, emotionally. At first I was wringing my hands, reconsidering the ethical implications of letting my cat out. I've always held, and still hold, the position that cats and dogs are adults of their own species and it's not only inhumane but ridiculous to treat them like human infants. But owning a cat means that I am responsible for what it does, not only for potential damage to other humans, but also for potential pain inflicted on other animals. I am responsible for the flayed rabbit.

I also still consider that Lina killing chipmunks and voles is not a big problem; all the dead ones I've observed were cleanly killed, as mentioned above. What I think happened this time was that she took on (and actually hauled into my apartment) something that was too big and strong for her, but not enough so to escape.

The best solution I can think of is to not let her outside unsupervised (when I'm not at home) until mid-summer when there are fewer baby rabbits. Although, I'm in agreement with my coworker Willy who said "Cats are vicious animals" and Terry Pratchett, who wrote that if cats looked like frogs we would hate them.

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Anyway that's resolved now. But I still feel like...the flayed rabbit is a good metaphor for how I've been feeling these last few months, skinless and sensitive to everything, crippled.

Forcing me to think about animal welfare and ecology is forcing me to think about bioethics which is forcing me to think about philosophy...and I hate philosophy. (I got into a fight with a previous boyfriend when I said this once. He majored in math in college and went to grad school for theology, so the clash wasn't surprising.) Back in high school and in the first couple of years of college I used to be a deeper thinker than I am now. But at some point it all got entangled with the Americans' "culture wars" bullshit and my brain started feeling like it was going to explode. The only way I could get any peace was to stop thinking.

It's really strange. I have a fairly cold, abstract response to things that most people would respond emotionally to, and an emotional response to things that other people find abstract. Touching a bleeding wild animal and killing it with my hands didn't bother me as much as the sheer guilt of knowing that it was my fault. It was funny, I could feel myself putting on an act of physical distress for Steve, the grimaces, the stiff posture, the trembling hands - the same way you act interested to a boring person or act polite to a boor. Because, you know, a girl should be frightened and disgusted by finding a half-dead rabbit in her house, and need her boyfriend to comfort her.

But I really wasn't. I'm frightened and disgusted by myself.

It's funny because a few months ago, I would have told you I was a happy person, and I have every reason to be. These past weeks, though...these past days, there's a constant current of rage running through my body, seeking excuses, opportunities to be angry at anything and anybody, to lash out mentally if not in fact.

It's partly low blood sugar, especially near the end of the day, but a full stomach only blunts the anger, not abolishing it completely. Peace comes only from total escapism - in novels, or in total immersion in physical activity - riding, lab work, playing with the cat, woodwork, necking. I don't want to think, it burns.

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There's an undergraduate student who comes into our lab part-time whom I dislike because he's a loudmouthed little braggart who goes around telling everybody he's found a cure for HIV when he doesn't even have basic lab skills. But what disturbs me is that he's started a student group to invite speakers to give talks on regenerative and anti-aging therapies, including one guy who's regarded as a crackpot by most other scientists who claims that aging is a disease and that with the right treatment, people could live practically forever. A couple of issues ago, WIRED magazine ran an article on another longevity buff that got under my skin.

Again, it's funny though. The thing that I'm disturbed by isn't what you might expect, the religious angle - it doesn't. After all, for those who take the Bible literally, some people might have lived close to a millenium.

I'm irritated by their sheer stupidity in mistaking quantity for quality when it comes to life. Part of the joy of life does come from the things that can hurt you - food and other sensual indulgences, simply relaxing, and even doing things that put you in physical danger. What's the point of living to a hundred and fifty, or two hundred, if you spend those years eating like a beggar, exercising like an Olympian, acting like a monk, and taking fifty pills a day?

The other reason I find it all ridiculous is that, at this point, I can not imagine wanting to not die.

I just want to assure anybody reading this that I'm not suicidal or interested in hurting myself. As described above, life is great in other respects, and certainly I'd rather live to a ripe old age and pass away with a minimum of discomfort. But right now I feel like I'm starting to go crazy, and it's unbearable being angry all the time and afraid of screwing up in front of everybody. I'm like the rabbit with no skin on. Everything hurts. If someone told me I would die tomorrow and there is no God but oblivion after, that would still be fine.

It's so easy to imagine how something like that could happen: the slip from a blowout or an errant pebble; the long, sickening moment of falling sideways; and finally a brutal impact with several tons of metal. Cervical dislocation. Or something.

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This too shall pass. Someday I'm going to have to stop running away from my mind.