Recently on the Internet, I went to the website of the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources. I wanted to confirm when deer season was in this area. I live in Covington, so that’s why I checked out Kentucky instead of Ohio.
I didn’t spend a bunch of time there because I’m not a hunter. I just wanted to see why so many of my Facebook friends were posing with dead deer on their Facebook pages. I figured it out. Deer season was fairly recently.
Yes, I’m on Facebook. Does that shock you? Would it also shock you that I have never posed with a dead animal in my life?
My father had a lake on his farm and one time while fishing, I caught a pretty good sized bass. Someone took a picture of me holding up the fish — think it was my mother. Just so you know, should that picture ever show up somewhere on the Internet, I threw the bass back into the lake. Bass, deer, whatever it is: I’m not into killing animals. I won’t be killing them with a gun, with a fishing pole or anything else. I won’t be standing in front of a camera saying “cheese” while holding up a dead anything. If you are, I don’t care. To each his or her own, but I’m a lover — not a killer.
That’s not to say I haven’t killed an animal or two in my life. I’ve had mice get into my living space and yes, I used a mousetrap or two to get rid of them. Ever use a glue trap? I did once — not with a mouse, but with a rat. It was a nightmare of an experience.
This was back in my married days and in the mid 1980’s. My wife and kids and I owned a house in Colerain Township, kind of close to Colerain Avenue and all those restaurants located there. One fall season, residents in this area were having trouble with rats. Reports were flying that these rodents were actually getting into some of the houses.
I can attest to that. One night, I thought I heard something in our hallway closet. I had no idea how a rat could get inside it, but I thought I heard squeaking. I wasn’t about to open the door to it, but the next day, on the suggestion from a neighbor, I went to a hardware store and purchased a glue trap.
Now, with this glue trap, I probably wasn’t thinking the procedure through very well. Maybe I was thinking if it was a rat, it would get caught in the glue and then I could somehow set it free outside. Man — stupid, stupid thinking.
A night or two after purchasing the glue trap and placing it in the bottom of the hallway closet, in the middle of the night, I heard massive squeaking coming from inside it.
There, inside the closet, was this large, gray rat stuck on the glue trap trying desperately to escape. It was pissed. There was no way it would simple let me pick it up and set it free outside. I was in absolute horror. I had to do something and quickly. When I made my decision, I kept telling myself, “Don’t think about it, just do it.”
I found a hammer in the kitchen. I went back to the closet, kneeled over and bashed in that rat’s head. Looking up above on a shelf in the closet, I found an empty shoebox. I picked the rat up by the tail with its feet still stuck to the glue trap, and threw it in the box. I then walked outside and wearing nothing but my underwear, threw the shoebox in the trash can.
Colerain Township handled the rat issues quickly and the problem never returned. I now realize using a glue trap to trap that rat was cruel and to this day, I’m glad I told myself to simply block the experience out of my head and “Just do it”— just fix my mistake the only way I knew how. Otherwise, I think killing that rat would still be haunting my memory to this day. So, I guess I’ve done what I consider some necessary animal killing, but I’ve never killed anything with a gun. My grandfather did.
He and my grandmother lived on a large farm outside of Vevay, Indiana. He would kill animals when he needed to, but, like me, was mainly a lover of life.
I remember him crying once when he had to shoot and kill a dog that was getting into his chicken coop and killing his chickens. My twin brother and I were visiting for a few days and I remember with tears in his eyes, he found it necessary to sit my brother and me down and tell us why he had to do what he did.
Sometimes when my twin brother and I visited, we would wake up to hear granddad returning with an early morning hunting trip. There would be dead rabbits and sometimes dead turkeys lying on a table just outside the kitchen. My grandmother would skin these animals and put them in a freezer to be eaten later.
This was back in the late 1950’s. I know my grandfather shot his share of deer too. I remember eating deer steak my grandmother would fry up in a pan. If I said it wasn’t delicious, I’d be lying. When my grandfather hunted, it wasn’t for sport. It was to feed him and his family and I totally respect that. While killing animals is something I’m just not into, I want to think the people posing with those dead deer on Facebook killed them for the same reason my grandfather did all those years ago. Maybe they’re not, but let me think it anyway.
This article appears in Dec 31, 2014 – Jan 6, 2015.
