I surprised myself today, and in doing so, found myself with a blog topic.

Over the years, I’ve been exposed to enough disgusting things that I consider myself rather toughened, emotionally. I’m sensitive, yes, but in most situations I can keep my composure. I’ve knelt in pools of blood holding pieces of people together. I’ve held girlfriends’ hair back while they threw up enough alcohol to kill a horse. I’ve watched an airplane with a living man in it turn into a ball of metal with a corpse in it, right before my eyes on a sunny afternoon. I’ve picked up body parts at a plane crash site and put them into plastic bags. I’ve identified the body of one of my best friends in a morgue. I’m not saying this to be macho, but because it bears on what happened today.

I was in a place called Bass Pro Shops / Sportsman’s Warehouse, picking up some supplies. At the end of an aisle was a DVD player, endlessly repeating some sort of hunter training video. A noise caught my attention (some sort of animal call, I think, that sounded just like a human baby screaming), and I walked down to see what the program was about.

The scene changed just as I got there, and a man with a rifle and his camo-clad buddy began talking about an animal he’d just shot. I expected it was probably a deer.

I love deer, they’re beautiful animals. I’ve seen deer shot, though, and I’ve eaten venison. While seeing an animal die is never pleasant, prey animals are just that. Man, as the most dangerous of predators, has killed animals for food for aeons and it will probably always be so. At least the animal’s life served a purpose, and wasn’t wasted.

The camera zoomed out. It wasn’t a deer. I believe it was a lynx; a member of the cat family, perhaps twice the size of a common house cat. It was beautiful. The man began to tell the story of how he’d baited it in with raw meat, and how it had taken two shots from his high-powered rifle to kill it. As he talked, he kept flipping the poor cat’s body around. Lifting up its head. Pulling back its cheeks to show its teeth. Lifting it by one foreleg as its lifeless head lolled obscenely.

My jaw dropped. My heart pounded, my stomach turned over, and I noticed I was sweating. I could not believe my eyes. This wasn’t a prey animal. This was a beautiful, graceful, intelligent creature; a proud predator itself, out looking for its next meal. It wasn’t going to be dinner on anyone’s table tonight. It was killed purely for sport. These freakish excuses for human beings in their camouflage jumpsuits and Realtree hats just thought it would be FUN to shoot something to death, just to prove they could do it, and show the results to whatever sort of deviate would watch that sort of video. Or, in this case, me.

I have no problem with hunters, per se. I respect them as long as they respect the life and spirit of the animals they take. Most of the men on my mother’s side of the family are deer hunters, and I have no problem with that. If they kill it, they eat it. As for me, so long as I can go to Kroger and get a pound of meat, I personally don’t feel I have a legitimate need to hunt, and so I don’t.

I have no problem with firearms, either, per se. At one time, I was even a very competent rifle marksman, shooting competitively and doing quite well at it. I just don’t associate firearms with killing. Paper targets don’t bleed. This is basically what separates me from the gun nuts who have “Insured by Smith & Wesson” on their bumper stickers, and have permits to carry concealed handguns chambered for bullets that could take down a bull elephant, for “defense”.

This DVD wasn’t about hunting. It wasn’t about sport or competition shooting, either. It was just documentation of a deranged, indiscriminate killing. It made me sick … sick enough that I actually did lose my composure for a moment. A voice said, quite loudly, “You sick, sick fucks! What is WRONG with YOU? WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHOOT EACH OTHER!” I quickly recognized the voice as my own, and probably went kind of red; my face felt very hot. I hit the power switch on the TV, spun on my heel, and walked out, the image of that poor lynx still in my mind.

I don’t know if it’s a sign of a deep character flaw of some sort that an animal, shot down for no reason at all, affected me more than the news stories I hear every day about people who meet with the same fate. Perhaps it’s because when someone commits homicide, they usually (USUALLY) don’t go on videotape and brag about it, disrespecting and desecrating the body as they do so. At any rate, my emotional reaction surprised me. Maybe part of it was that the lynx had stripes, and reminded me a little of Tony.

Tony, by the way, is still doing very well, and I am so happy that he’s happier and more comfortable now. I give thanks every day. The doctor, at one point, had told me he probably only had a few weeks left. Last week, I refilled his monthly interferon prescription for the fifth time. He’s not out of the woods, and things could take a turn at any time, but he’s really impressed me with this comeback. He is a truly wonderful cat, such a blessing.

And now, at 4:00 AM, the drive to sleep is slowly outstripping the drive to blog. I’m going to go curl up with my cats.