To Save All Sentient Beings; To Affirm Life and Not To Kill

It's harder than you think to crush a chipmunk's skull. Especially when it keeps moving.

A while ago, I wrote here that for a time I had adopted a second cat as a companion to my pet cat, Eliot. She didn't get along with Eliot so I had to return her (it was part of the arrangement that I could bring her back if they didn't get along). But the problem of Eliot being alone all day remained, so eventually I gave it a second shot and adopted a grey-and-white male named Izzy, and as it turns out they get along great. They groom each other and play together, usually some sort of chase-and-wrestle game. Sometimes their play gets a little out of hand and I have to break them up, but it's really no different than two little kids who sometimes play a little too rough. But the bottom line is that Eliot now has a friend, so at least that problem's solved.

Today, when I left for work, Eliot stayed inside the house and Izzy was outside. When I came home, Izzy was waiting on my porch, but when I leaned over to pat him on his head, he ran off. I let Eliot out of the house and together we walked over to see what was up with Izzy.

It turns out that he had caught a chipmunk, one of Eliot's favorite preys. It was still alive but squirming in pain in his clutches. Izzy would let go of it for a moment only to pounce back onto it, but the chipmunk could no longer run away. I didn't see any blood, but I imagine that my dear little pet might have broken the chipmunk's legs with his rough play so that it was no longer able to escape its tormentor.

Eliot came by to take his own little swipe at it, and soon the two cats were huddled over the injured, frightened little creature, occasionally pouncing on it when it managed to slide a few inches away. They didn't display anything that I would call malice toward the chipmunk and seemed to have no intention of killing it, much less eating it. They just seemed to like jumping on top of it with their claws out, and occasionally picking it up with their mouths and dragging it to some other part of the driveway.

I know that this is simply cats acting in accordance their own nature, but my own nature is to be compassionate and try to protect the chipmunk. But if I took the cats away and brought them inside and away from their prey, the chipmunk wouldn't have lived for long, much less stopped its suffering. It was clearly my responsibility to take it out of its misery by ending its life. It was my duty to finish what my domesticated cats wouldn't. As Tom Waits once sang, "There's always some killin' you got to do around the farm."

But how to do it? I was wearing a pair of black oxford shoes (I had just come from the office) and not the kind of boot with which I could have stomped on it. In my mind, I envisioned using the edge of a shovel to quickly decapitate it, but then I realized that I didn't own that kind of shovel. I looked in the trunk of my car to see what I might have had, but found nothing but an umbrella - a useless tool for the job at hand. And that's when it hit me - the best tool that I have for this sad job - one that I keep in the toolbox in the closet off of the kitchen.

A rock hammer is a tool that geologists use, a sort of short-handled sledge hammer. Some are modified picks for finessing a mineral out of its matrix, and others are dull sledges for just plain old busting up rock. I have both kinds, but selected the latter for the job. I went to the kitchen, opened the toolbox in the closet, and took out my weapon of choice.

The cats were still tormenting the chipmunk when I got back outside, but I shooed then away. The chipmunk was laying on its side, spinning around like some sort of crazy pinwheel powered by one apparently working leg. I wanted to only hit it but once and to hit it hard square on the head so as to take it out of its pain and terror as quickly and mercifully as I could, but it was moving quite a bit and suddenly the hammer in my hand seemed quite small. I waited to see if it would stop, but it kept moving, so taking my best aim, I lifted up the hammer and brought it down on the chipmunk's skull.

Which, to my surprise, didn't collapse under the blow. The blow managed to pop one eye out its socket and cause blood to issue from its mouth, but the chipmunk kept moving, albeit now in violent, spasmodic convulsions.

I felt awful and sick. Quickly, I hit it again, and then again, and then another time to try to end its suffering as quickly as I could. By the fourth or fifth blow, its skull was completely crushed. It must have been dead, but the body kept twitching, possibly in post-mortem spasms but I couldn't tell for sure. Feeling now like some sort of monster, I hit it again and then a final time. It's head was now horrifically flattened and after a moment or two, only its tail twitched and then finally that, too, stopped.

The cats were staring at me in shock and awe. They didn't know that I had such brutality in my nature.

I scooped up the corpse with a piece of cardboard, put it in a trash bag, and dropped it in the trash. The cats seemed to have instantly forgotten their game and I called them back into the house for their dinner. I washed the blood off of the hammer and put it away.

In Buddhism, we vow to save all living things, and I had just killed a sentient being in the most brutal way I can imagine. We take a precept to affirm life and not to kill, and I had just killed. Of course, to have merely taken the cats away and just left it there would have been to kill it to, but only more slowly. Killing the chipmunk was the kindest thing I could have done to it, even if it hadn't happened quite as quickly as I would have liked. In all, I don't think more than 5 seconds had passed between the first and last blow of the hammer, and the first one probably killed it, or at least rendered it brain dead and beyond feeling pain, and all motion after the first strike was probably just reflex. But still . . .

I don't blame the cats - they were merely expressing their true nature as domesticated predators. It's their instinct to kill smaller animals, it's hard wired into their DNA. And I don't blame myself - even if I hadn't let Izzy outside, there are other cats out there killing other chipmunks and larger predators killing larger prey, not to mention humans and their crimes and wars. I just got caught up for a moment in that cycle of birth and death, and intimately experienced what it is to kill and what it is to suffer, and by extension, what it is to die and what it is to live.

But washing the blood off the hammer, I knew that I had killed. I didn't enjoy it - it horrified me - but I was still capable of doing it. In Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Zen Master Dogen wrote, "Do good things secretly while people are not watching, and if you make a mistake or do something bad, confess and repent of it. When you act in this matter, good deeds you have done in secret will have recompense, and wrongdoings will be revealed and repented" (Book 1, Chapter 18).

So after putting the hammer away, I turned on my computer, got on line, and opened up Water Dissolves Water.