Certified Humane

Mornings are often a blur- some days more than others. At times, donning one’s reading glasses while going about the morning breakfast preparation routine can be of some assistance. Other times, however, nothing one does can help, or improve upon the ante meridian miasma. Lately I have been more likely to have my reading glasses available as I prepare the morning repast after the repeated round of mocking I received from my visiting sister and brother-in-law. This followed two straight mornings of my bringing in representatives from our local selection of garden fauna amongst the raspberries and strawberries picked for consumption along with my scratch waffles. It became a source of amusement for them, as each bowl of berries I brought in from the backyard was scanned through for evidence of life- usually in the form of small spiders and baby slugs which had gone unnoticed as I grabbed for reddish, roundish objects that seemed of the right firmness and color. Some forms of adaptations to the troubles of older age do not always cover all the bases left open by some of the ravages of the years.

I believe it was for another reason and a few days worth of breakfasts later, after my sister’s departure, that I was wearing my glasses again before breakfast. We have been having a plague of rodents in our house as of late. Rats have been running under the floor boards and across ceilings and up and down through walls and insulation. Mice have been everywhere- stashes of dog kibble in wayside shoes and nibbled holes out of fruit left in bowls on the kitchen counter stand as a non verbal testament to their omnipresence. The problem with their being here, beyond the rampant destruction of attic insulation and the stench from unbridled and indiscriminate rodent urination, is the fact that it is basically non-negotiable in so-called humane terms- you can’t sit down with this type of rat pack and work out a mutually agreeable separation. I was wearing my glasses this morning because on the previous morning in one of the three mouse traps I had set out the night before, I had found a mouse- one that because of my blurry morning state I hadn’t realized was still alive until I caught a glimpse of some motion from it that continued even after it had been bumped and then left alone by the cord on the coffee grinder. To put an end to its motion and apparent suffering I dispatched it with a blow from my Teva.

And so it was that this next morning I had on my reading glasses as I inspected the latest Victor trap catch. While it did not have those cartoon X’s over its eyes, it did have that particular glazed look of a being that wasn’t still inhabited by a spirit or presence. And while still wearing my reading glasses I happened to notice, as the waffle building process was just about to begin again, that a small, printed box on top of the egg carton contained the two words: "Certified Humane". There they were there, staring at me like the piercing eyes of a rat in a trap, in small but prominent type. It did give me pause in regard to my rodent killing frenzy, but only until I glanced over to the plums on the counter with the random divots gnawed out of them, along with the scattered remains of the rodent digestive process dotting the ledge above the sink and stove. This was the sixth catch in the past week, with others still uncaught and seen making mad dashes across the floor in various places around the house. I know about live traps, but I also know that they just transfer the problem elsewhere. And as it is, the carcasses go outside to obscure but open places in the yard, and more often than not they have disappeared in a few days as a prized meal somewhere in the food chain.

In truth, my concept of what "humane" really is was rattled and shaken the other day during a viewing of a small but quite amazing documentary- People of a Feather- by Joel Heath. It tells the tale of the Inuit people living in Canada out on the ice and the Belcher Islands of Hudson Bay. It shows how these people have, and in many ways still do, lived in a delicate balance with nature, and how, with the balance of nature being disturbed most aggressively through climate change, life in the polar regions of the globe is becoming even more of a challenge on top of the already daunting task it previously posed. We have all heard about the plight of the polar bears- I just noticed another two save the polar bear emails in my mailbox this morning. I have taken to deleting these after seeing the report that a genetic cross had been discovered between a polar bear and a grizzly recently. This was proof that the bears had started mixing their genes, most likely as a means to their mutual survival in response to changing environmental conditions. Most of my reason for deleting polar bear mail as of late is this: the only reason the griz-lar genetic cross had been detected was because this bear had been hunted down and killed for sport- so much for human concern and survival of the fittest.

I tend to avoid films whose focus is animal cruelty. I was given a copy of Earthlings a few years ago and still haven’t watched it. It documents conditions in stock yards and slaughter houses that I do not want to see- these visions are at least a part of why I stopped eating animals over thirty years ago. Another such film would be the Cove- I will probably not ever sit down to watch dolphins penned and clubbed for profit, or any other reason. But there was one scene in People of a Feather that will always be etched in my memory. It was a quite remarkable underwater shot of an eider duck diving below the ice and coming back up to the surface after feasting on mussels and sea urchins off the relatively shallow bottom. It was caught by a remote camera on a pole through a hole in the ice. It looks as though the duck is flying in slow motion through the water. But one soon realizes that it is fighting against a current that is going the opposite direction from where the exit to the air and the surface is. A good part of the film deals with how hydroelectric dams on rivers that feed into the Hudson Bay are causing the trapped water behind them to warm more than their former river forms allowed them to, and thus warming the bay and changing the persistence of the ice there, which is in turn causing a decline in the population of the eider ducks that the Inuit at least partly depend upon for their survival. As we watch the duck that was swimming to the air and the light slowly lose its struggle and become one with the current, one can’t help but imagine who will be watching when nature takes us for our final ride.