When Do-gooders Don't

I've killed my share of animals, mostly by accident.

There was the cat that darted in front of my car one night as I was cruising down US 1 in the Keys, the snake on a back road in Ohio's Clermont County, a really pregnant dove so heavy with eggs it couldn't lift off the road in Ohio's Preble County, and the 20 or so red snapper a friend and I caught from a pier near our operations building on Cudjoe Key. He insisted on scaling the fish instead of filleting them, which to me was more trouble than they were worth. I never fished again.

By sheer good luck in timing, I managed to avoid killing a deer while driving south of Milwaukee on I-94. For some reason it had decided it was a good idea to cross six lanes of heavily-trafficked interstate. It managed to make it across the southbound lanes in front of me and jump the concrete median, before the inevitable happened.

I try to avoid harming animals. One day, my wife and I were motoring down our street when a squirrel darted out in front of us. I slammed on the brakes. My wife was not amused.

"Why'd you do that," she demanded.

"Well, I didn't want to kill Sammy," I replied. "They have enough to worry about without having to worry about me."

"You wouldn't have done that for people," she accused.

"People should know better," I replied, ever loath to explain the obvious.

My neighbor doesn't share my concern over what she calls rats with furry tails.

"I kill them every chance I get," she proudly proclaimed.

It seems she has a bird feeder which, despite her rather creative attempts at securing it, has become, de facto, a squirrel feeder. I would rather she kill the birds. I have yet to suffer a squirrel downloading on my car.

Crossing my property line at one time or another have been opossum, raccoon, egret, ibis, frogs and probably others I'd rather not know about. Black snakes take up residency from time to time, and they get a pass because they eat the frogs. Trust me--you don't want to be kept awake all night by a croaking frog.

The yard is awash with what I call miniature dinosaurs but which are, in fact, rather nondescript lizards. They're okay, too, because they eat bugs. When one manages to gain access to the indoors I try to shoo it out. Failing that, then, well, it's going to go, one way or another.

I don't particularly care about animals; I'm just not into animal abuse. However, there are those whose professed concern for them sometimes does more harm than good.

Some years ago, a couple living in Wisconsin owned a pair of huskies, or malamutes, or some sort of sled dog. During a rather brutal winter, a pair of animal rights whackos decided that leaving the dogs outside was cruel. One night they stole the dogs and took them into their home. The dogs promptly shed all their fur, losing their very adequate protection against the cold.

Florida's Hillsborough County just passed a law making it a crime to leave a dog tethered outside without supervision. Never mind that tethers keep mutts from running out into a street and being killed. Nope, it's apparently cruel to leave a dog alone, chained to a tree.

Seriously? They're dogs! They download on carpets! They hump your leg! They drink from toilet bowls and mud puddles! The whole world, inside and out, is their urinal! And besides, did anyone ask the dog?

Know what poetic justice is? That's when one of the goofs who fought to have the law passed will walk by a yard occupied by an untethered pitbull, which will jump or dig under the fence and take a healthy bite out of the whacko's posterior. Can you say "lawsuit?"

Of course, I could be wrong--novel as that concept is.