On Killing A Mouse

at the deli today we found a mouse trapped in a sticky trap. i think all people who have ANYTHING to do with sticky traps should also have to experience the slow and disgusting death on a sticky trap. so what to do? i didn't have the frame of mind this time to put it out of it's misery, say by chopping it's head off, or smashing it's little brains in. so i put him in the freezer better way to die than a day and a half starving frightened shitting on herself stuck to a sticky trap.

a few years ago i was battling with some mice in my room for the right to sleep at night. i set a trap for them to wake me up in the middle of the night and would catch 'em and dump them out the window. (1st floor). one morning i can't remember what but i shut a drawer and crushed one. it was awful. probably she was someone's mother, a mammal, sensual, caring for her kids. i don't know how to build new mice, the best i can do is produce sperm who don't last very long after swimming.

when i want to learn obout some insects, i have to freeze them, or bust open a gall to see what grubs live inside it. sometimes i don't do this then. it is difficult. the main thing about life on earth is that life eats life to live, anyway.. but i find it difficult to take life.

when i was a kid, i heard some radio interview about people who grew and slaughtered their own animals, so i thought i would try it that summer, i caught, killed and cooked a frog. wasn't pleasant, hard to tell when a frog is dead.

i'm mostly vegetarian for a number of reasons.

but i'm never perfect. alas.

i think yhvh too, is horrified about the fact that the life he created eats life to live. I think that's what a lot of halakha is about. what do you do with this fact that we are life that eats life to live and are eaten also (in one way or another).

and rakhmanut? you know, the rekhem (womb) is a very dangerous place. somewhere between 15% and 50% of all conceptions end in spontaneous abortion! life constantly experiments with ITSELF and in the process often gets it wrong.

now humans in general are appalled by the fact that delicate amazing craftsmanship of living beings like dragonflies are also MERELY FOOD! this appals most of us and makes us desire a heavenly existence. much religion is a result of this horror.


animals eat animals. in fact at root life is a cycle: molecules come together with high energy bonds, then molecules come apart and release energy and back around again. life always cycles building, tearing down. it is the way.

otherwise you are an eternal quartz crystal. not so interesting.

so the point of Judaism is not to try to fly off into peter pan world, but to engage in this embarrassing and difficult world of life.