The last time I killed any living thing larger than a cockroach was when I was ten years old. We had just moved to accommodation in an army base up in the hills that was reserved for the families of officers who were posted to conflict zones abroad. It was the first time that my family and I were away for an extended period of time from the city of our births, having sold off everything that could connect us to our past and the recent overwhelming personal trauma that we were so desperately trying to escape at the time.
In this new hill town, six hours away from everything that was familiar to me and my kid brother, in the midst of the school holidays, in a time and era pre-internet and even reliable electricity, with boundless picturesque and accessible spaces for children to roam (mostly safely and unencumbered by the watchful eye of a responsible adult), someone thought that it would be good idea to buy us an air-rifle, complete with pellets and clear instructions for easy reloading.
I eventually shot a small sparrow that was perched comfortably on the sun shade of our unit just above the living room window after many missed attempts. I remember carefully lining up the shot in the rifle's crosshairs for what seemed like an eternity and pulling the trigger with the only thought in my mind being that I should not miss this time. My brother, all of four years old at the time, and I were not prepared for the bird to die. We both felt an immediate sense of grief and remorse, and spent the next few hours digging a grave for the bird in our backyard and giving it a meaningful burial - all the while trying not to garner the attention of anyone in the vicinity, and feeling as if we had just committed a serious crime.
Those were not the circumstances behind the euthanising of our beloved pet yesterday, but the familiar shock of culpability was immediately apparent from that previous time, almost thirty-seven years ago now.
I am sure fishers, hunters, poachers, rangers, butchers, and game-range staffers are inured to the feeling of having invested a considerable amount of time and energy to take a once living being's life by their own actions, and have justified those actions to themselves (or not) in a variety of deeply considered ways. Even though it is hard for me to relate in any meaningful way to those justifications, I did share yesterday the basic modus operandi by which we achieved our common goal - I rang a phone number to discuss the exchange of money for a service or product (as someone must have similarly done to acquire the air-rifle that I used to end the life of that bird all those years ago), welcomed the means by which the death of my dog would take place, discussed inane aspects of the agent's task at hand with him; such as the composition of the injections that he was about to administer and how he was going to administer them, and arranged all the necessary logistical elements by which my dog's life would be ended and her remains carted away in the same car in which the agent arrived.
I still can't believe how easy it was, both in the circumstance of the bird's death back then and my dog's death yesterday - we used the means at our disposal to end the life of a whole creature so matter-of-factly.
My brother and I did not know that bird's provenance thirty-seven years ago - I am only assuming it was a sparrow in the recounting due to the prevalence of the species in the area and the size of the bird. But my family and I did know everything about the dog I killed yesterday. Its beginnings as an abandoned, unwanted mongrel in a farm somewhere in rural Victoria, found by chance by a passing daytripper and deposited in the nearest animal shelter. The place where we acquired her from - right at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown era in the most locked-down city on earth. The fact that we were breaking the lockdown rules that were strictly in place at the time to travel to the rescue centre from where we brought her back home because we were so desperate to get her. The long walks with her, the long cuddles with her, the bonds we each developed with her individually, the loyalty that each engendered from the other in unique and shared ways over the time we spent with her, the move to our forever home where we were finally able to make structural and family-routine changes to accommodate her particular and idiosyncratic needs, the routine of her feeds, her exercise regimen, her demands to be placed front and centre in our lives, the completeness of our family circle and, ultimately treacherously, believing the idea that this feeling of belonging would last forever.
Then on to the very short and very aggressive period of her final illness, the interminable vet hospital visits, and the various treatments, and the various non-recoveries from said treatments, until everything got too much for her and for us... until yesterday.
Should we have made it so easy for us to end the life of a living being - just by exercising our consumerist capacity to procure the means to do so? Should we be allowed to determine the fate of a living being just because of our anthropogenic primacy?
Should I have killed my dog yesterday, by first justifying the act to myself and my family as the only way to end her suffering, simply because I could?
