All God's Creatures

Our dog Norm just loves being outdoors.  If left to his own devices, he'd spend pretty much every waking moment out in our fenced and wooded back yard, where he chases squirrels and chipmunks, sniffs about, and entertains himself by gathering fallen sticks and branches and piling them in the middle of the small lawn.  We try not to leave him out for more than an hour, as the longer he spends out there the more feral he becomes, but it's hard not to indulge the boy.  Given that the first two years of his life were all in shelters, the freedom to run and leap and dig is...well...it's kind of why we got him.  

Having a dog in the house reminds us that we're not the only living things in this world.  It helps remind us that all of God's creatures deserve our care and our love.

Yesterday, as I walked through the basement, I saw him sitting right by the sliding doors to the back yard.  

Around him, in a great swarming cloud, were a host of mosquitoes.  Drawn by his panting exhalations, filled with the carbon dioxide and organics whose scent trail they follow to their prey, there were dozens and dozens of them, both the little whiny-winged natives and the largest and fiercely striped Asian Tigers.  It's been wetter lately, after a long dry summer season, and all of the local subspecies of the Family Culicidae have come roaring back with a vengeance.  Norm looked resigned.

I muttered choice imprecations at the little beasts, and went to get the Swatter, which I bought as a gift for the missus a few years back.  It's one of those plastic racquetball racket shaped paddle thingummies, where in the place of strings are interlaced three layers of metal mesh.  The middle, inmost layer is electrified, drawing a surprising amount of current from a pair of Double A batteries in the handle.  

It is designed for the purpose of destroying flying insects, at which it is remarkably and satisfyingly efficacious.

I slid the door open, at which Norm barreled in and went charging up the stairs, leaving his assailants behind.  Then I waded out into the lingering swarm, safety off, power engaged.

It was a slaughter, as the snap crackle and pop of current frying skeeter after skeeter was nearly continuous.  Sparks flashed like heat lighting across the surface of my weapon, and the air filled with the smell of burning and electrical discharge.  Within moments the ground around me was littered with dozens of tiny lifeless corpses.  I continued for a while, methodically sweeping my thirteen-dollar Chinese plastic Mjolnir through the air, watching for any furtive and shadowy movement that might indicate more of them incoming, then smiting them from the air like a Norse god.  When no more remained, and no more came to replace them, I withdrew.

It wasn't a particularly peaceful interlude in my afternoon, I'll admit.  It was a wee bit asymmetric.  Perhaps a little unfair.  I, a sentient bipedal creature, social and industrialized.  They, little more than self-replicating mechanisms, oblivious of their place in being or my campaign against them.  I mean, they are still living beings, albeit simple and parasitic.  They are remarkably complex, and remarkably rare in the universe.  I generally find that I'm inclined to live in harmony with life around me, which is one of the reasons I choose not to eat other animals.

But then again, mosquitoes are our most implacable nonhuman adversary.  Forget grizzlies and tigers, because mosquitoes, as a disease vector, kill a million human beings every year.  We do not need to tolerate that which destroys us, any more than bees tolerate predatory hornets, or dolphins tolerate sharks.  Life is permitted to protect itself.

And Lord, was it satisfying.