Animal Family
The rodents are redundant
this year, having easily survived
last year’s mild winter. We watch
baby chipmunks scamper
from beneath the porch, playing
tag amidst the dry leaves;
rabbits bounce through
a game of hop scotch
in the junipers
Up on the hill the deer graze
on our shrubs, a forest of
forsythia now a razor shaven edge
of barren stalks, blindly awaiting
winter’s deep freeze
Squirrels have burrowed
into the attic, building
a home among the eaves,
arriving and departing
with the ease of a lazy roofer
through a crack in the flashing;
their well fed family proliferates daily.
I climb up, hammer in hand,
but cannot go in for the kill
I should pray for cold weather
to reduce this pesky population;
instead, I am secretly delighted
by the wild kingdom residing
in our own backyard, remnants
of the family we never had
together.
–Liz Burk
Draft © E. Burk 2005 All rights reserved
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Toby's Trial (Prose by Jim)
Animal caretaker for the experimental psychology lab was my decades ago college work-study job. Sans a major during Vietnam draft days, a path to grad school and paying rent were jobs 1 and 1A. So, a farm boy flattered to be noticed by the learned, urban professor recruiting me, and intellectually smitten with Science, I was clay ready for shaping.
Except for one detail, that one main “caretaking” duty was liquidating the animals whose experiments were done, it might have worked out. But the lab produced a constant stream of “retirees” – with no budget to put them down humanely. The extant procedure was, yes, to put 10-20 rats in a bucket – pour in carbon tetrachloride (a cheap toxic dry cleaning fluid) and cover the bucket – until all sounds of frantic motion ceased. A painful, mass, panicked death indeed.
When my boss refused to, I bought more expensive chloroform. Using soaked cotton, I picked up each rat and covered its face. Little struggle or pain, just quick unconsciousness before the bucket. Executing pigeons was more difficult and upsetting as they took longer to die.
What was happening to me? I was now a killer for pay – not my own kind to be sure – but, hands on and personally. And when I began to “devise” ways to lessen the birds’ suffering, it was clear I’d become a scientist all right – if experiments in efficient mass killing are “science.” You may recall a surfeit of such research in Germany and Japan in the 1940's. I did.
Struggling to cope, I began to find homes for a few, as tame white lab rats any lack self-survival skills. Pigeons had a chance, but had to be transported miles (a few at time in my tiny sports car); otherwise they’d congregate on the lab’s roof – and the researchers were callous, not dumb.
Some animals had wires implanted in their brains through a socket attached with sloppily applied pink dental acrylic. One of my courses included placing these into rats’ pain and pleasure centers. They were anaesthetized, placed in a “head vise,” scalps retracted and skull tops sawed off. Hardly neurosurgeons and “unscrubbed,” we aimed our probes with a rat brain “atlas.”
After operating and stitching, we returned the unconscious to their reasonably clean cages. Recoverees were “culled” by being hooked to a shocking apparatus for testing, e.g., a rodent squealing and writhing meant we had a viable pain center subject.
School and work grew increasingly surreal. "Pay to play" had become "Kill to graduate." Late one night two friends and I got fairly wasted and went to the lab. Rod in particular was never averse to skirting the edge of the bizarre, but both were blown away watching rats pressing bars to receive pleasure shocks – you may have heard about rats in these experiments dying of thirst because they wouldn't stop to drink....
My buddies decided a mock trial for a rat might somehow assuage my dilemma. One acted as defense counsel for “Toby” (named on the spot), the other prosecutor for “pure research” and I the judge. Frankenstein-headed rats weren’t placeable, plus might garner unwanted attention (and while killing university property was my job, stealing it was a felony). Thus Toby, an innocent rat in a kangaroo court, was sentenced to die – by turning the pleasure machine’s power all the way up.
The guys thought this a great way to go... ...blazing out in an orgasmic explosion....... ....and in my slaughter-benumbed soul, I decided, think what you will, it couldn’t be much worse than inhaling chemical death in a dark, crowded, bucket. So hesitating only briefly, I set the controls to maximum.......
Hooked to his wired tether, well-trained Toby approached the bar.... ...and when he pressed it.... ....jumped half his height off the ground!!
Then lay quivering. But soon got up... ...went right back.... ...and pressed more vigorously than ever, acclimating to the new intensity of ecstasy. So Toby had the pleasurefest of a lab rat’s life before dying “normally” a few days later. And taught me a lesson.
No, I didn’t start a humane animal research movement – would that I had. But things change, and maybe I shouldn’t be cynical. Maybe standards are tighter now? Maybe that lab was an exception?? Maybe, maybe, maybe......
At the time, though, my only focus was leaving this charnel house. I soon quit my federally subsidized job and found an honest gig in a gas station. And set about becoming something – and someone – else.
–Jim Keller
September 6, 2005 Draft © 2005 by J. Keller.
All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.
(Excerpted version published in "Readers Write" Sun Magazine No. 360, Dec. 2005)
Except for one detail, that one main “caretaking” duty was liquidating the animals whose experiments were done, it might have worked out. But the lab produced a constant stream of “retirees” – with no budget to put them down humanely. The extant procedure was, yes, to put 10-20 rats in a bucket – pour in carbon tetrachloride (a cheap toxic dry cleaning fluid) and cover the bucket – until all sounds of frantic motion ceased. A painful, mass, panicked death indeed.
When my boss refused to, I bought more expensive chloroform. Using soaked cotton, I picked up each rat and covered its face. Little struggle or pain, just quick unconsciousness before the bucket. Executing pigeons was more difficult and upsetting as they took longer to die.
What was happening to me? I was now a killer for pay – not my own kind to be sure – but, hands on and personally. And when I began to “devise” ways to lessen the birds’ suffering, it was clear I’d become a scientist all right – if experiments in efficient mass killing are “science.” You may recall a surfeit of such research in Germany and Japan in the 1940's. I did.
Struggling to cope, I began to find homes for a few, as tame white lab rats any lack self-survival skills. Pigeons had a chance, but had to be transported miles (a few at time in my tiny sports car); otherwise they’d congregate on the lab’s roof – and the researchers were callous, not dumb.
Some animals had wires implanted in their brains through a socket attached with sloppily applied pink dental acrylic. One of my courses included placing these into rats’ pain and pleasure centers. They were anaesthetized, placed in a “head vise,” scalps retracted and skull tops sawed off. Hardly neurosurgeons and “unscrubbed,” we aimed our probes with a rat brain “atlas.”
After operating and stitching, we returned the unconscious to their reasonably clean cages. Recoverees were “culled” by being hooked to a shocking apparatus for testing, e.g., a rodent squealing and writhing meant we had a viable pain center subject.
School and work grew increasingly surreal. "Pay to play" had become "Kill to graduate." Late one night two friends and I got fairly wasted and went to the lab. Rod in particular was never averse to skirting the edge of the bizarre, but both were blown away watching rats pressing bars to receive pleasure shocks – you may have heard about rats in these experiments dying of thirst because they wouldn't stop to drink....
My buddies decided a mock trial for a rat might somehow assuage my dilemma. One acted as defense counsel for “Toby” (named on the spot), the other prosecutor for “pure research” and I the judge. Frankenstein-headed rats weren’t placeable, plus might garner unwanted attention (and while killing university property was my job, stealing it was a felony). Thus Toby, an innocent rat in a kangaroo court, was sentenced to die – by turning the pleasure machine’s power all the way up.
The guys thought this a great way to go... ...blazing out in an orgasmic explosion....... ....and in my slaughter-benumbed soul, I decided, think what you will, it couldn’t be much worse than inhaling chemical death in a dark, crowded, bucket. So hesitating only briefly, I set the controls to maximum.......
Hooked to his wired tether, well-trained Toby approached the bar.... ...and when he pressed it.... ....jumped half his height off the ground!!
Then lay quivering. But soon got up... ...went right back.... ...and pressed more vigorously than ever, acclimating to the new intensity of ecstasy. So Toby had the pleasurefest of a lab rat’s life before dying “normally” a few days later. And taught me a lesson.
No, I didn’t start a humane animal research movement – would that I had. But things change, and maybe I shouldn’t be cynical. Maybe standards are tighter now? Maybe that lab was an exception?? Maybe, maybe, maybe......
At the time, though, my only focus was leaving this charnel house. I soon quit my federally subsidized job and found an honest gig in a gas station. And set about becoming something – and someone – else.
–Jim Keller
September 6, 2005 Draft © 2005 by J. Keller.
All rights reserved. World Rights Reserved.
(Excerpted version published in "Readers Write" Sun Magazine No. 360, Dec. 2005)
Lines (Susan)
That winter I was eight
You took me ice fishing,
Wrapped me in bright yellow rope and tied it to a tree on shore.
Don’t disappear on me, you said.
Grown now, I hold your hand
Remembering opaque lines are for liquid
Gray lines hold you securely to your bed
While you in dream imagine us
Back on the boat again.
The morning we went to see the osprey’s nest,
You pointed to a spider web
Soft and shimmering on the stern,
Marveled how it held in the wind
All the way across the lake.
The last thing we saw on shore
A child holding a frayed rope
Knotted to a maple branch.
Swinging out over the water and back,
His wet toes digging into the sky.
–Susan Schefflein
Draft ©2005 S. Schefflein All Rights Reserved
You took me ice fishing,
Wrapped me in bright yellow rope and tied it to a tree on shore.
Don’t disappear on me, you said.
Grown now, I hold your hand
Remembering opaque lines are for liquid
Gray lines hold you securely to your bed
While you in dream imagine us
Back on the boat again.
The morning we went to see the osprey’s nest,
You pointed to a spider web
Soft and shimmering on the stern,
Marveled how it held in the wind
All the way across the lake.
The last thing we saw on shore
A child holding a frayed rope
Knotted to a maple branch.
Swinging out over the water and back,
His wet toes digging into the sky.
–Susan Schefflein
Draft ©2005 S. Schefflein All Rights Reserved
Mouse (Prose by Deborah)
I.
She had seen them before, children hunkered over in the middle of a sidewalk, or hunched on their elbows, butts up, hands busy, faces attentive. Blowing that odd yellowgrey dust this way and that. Dust half pollution, silt from cars humming a bodylength away. Half of it that same earth blown in from the desert south of Tehran, and slaked off houses on the way. Blowing it into piles, runnels, feeble towers, micro-architecture for citydwellers’ brutal shoes to annihilate.
A tiny tube in his mouth, the child was oblivious to the traffic-stuck taxi rider. Who saw that dust caked on his lips and cheekbones, powdering his hair. The tube like a fat spaghetti, that allowed for intricacies and arabesques in that most uncooperative medium. Had he learned the tube from watching an elder at his heroin ritual, she wondered. Gotten it from there, even. His wornsoft shirt flapped on skinny arms in a stifling blastoven breeze. She coughed away the dust, kept looking.
II.
These were no children, though. Men possibly thirty, miserable with no wives, or with them, their sex worn blatantly in their swagger, blissful, dumb. She with her imperfectly concealed light hair, normally a butt for this type, their leers, now going unnoticed. She relished the moment of obscurity, focused through the oppressive sunlight, took in the tableau.
The dry cleaner was away, still on siesta maybe, but business would pick up soon. They would need to finish their game. Whose nature she could almost, not quite yet, see. A child coming from the stores beyond wriggled free of his mother’s grip, came forward, as she did, shavings to a magnet There was laughter, of delight it seemed, or of someone-made-a-fool-of ilk. A flea circus, she thought, noting the small circle of attention, the minute reactions. The mother saw sooner, yanked the child homeward, veilwrap in her teeth, muttering imprecations or godforgiveusses.
A shallow box, a tiny writhing furry thing lay back, tail sweeping under it. On its belly a slit, like a vent but newly minted, mouth of rodent hell. The men gleefuly fingered down its paws, and held a dropper over it. Filled with dry cleaning fluid. Mindful of its poison stroke, careful to await its full effect, drop by dropperful they worked. A dark clot formed in her middle, nausea and anger in equal parts.
Theatre, she thought, or film, as they say here, that’s just film, or something played for an effect. So she was the effect, perhaps, that was her part, so though it seemed as though it could not be, that grown men could not be tormenting a small animal right there, there it was and there she was, the one-who-saw-and-had-to-say. It really was not her business how they got their gratification, she knew, yet no. Would the boys back home do it, if bereft of televisions, loinclothed gladiators, shoulderpadded aggressors, wives to knock on? Was she the emissary from a land of virtue, crossed her mind. Who had any room to talk, who had every right to--? No but just a bystander, surely, maybe not so innocent, who could say, speak out as anyone would but yet no one did.
No one did so it took relatively little time to do the righteous deed. Appeals to shamesense came easily, discovered late and exercised often. Hearing her clunky protest, the word torture as it came mangled out of her mouth, one of the men cried with overlarge how-can-I-help-it gesture, But Khanum! He was eating the clothes! And returned to his labors.
It really took only the time to scan the bent attentive backs, hear the raspy laughs, hear the little beast scraping and thumping, muffled squeaks. Her words were puny, laughable, separate from some other intent. Which drove her boots to the midst of the circle, all politesse aside. On their mercy mission, their gut justice jag. She gave them their papers, released their brute energy, said That’s right. And as she felt the volumes, bloated baby fingers, of mouse organs flattened, took a mental picture. Remembered the featherlike bones of a roast pigeon she’d eaten in Cairo once. Was glad for the width of her heels and the fineness of their construction. The way their edges met the ground. She felt under them the box turning, sliding; under them, small life ebbing. And walked on trembling, not looking back.
–Deborah Maier
Previously published in: Inkwell
©2001 D. Maier All Rights Reserved.
She had seen them before, children hunkered over in the middle of a sidewalk, or hunched on their elbows, butts up, hands busy, faces attentive. Blowing that odd yellowgrey dust this way and that. Dust half pollution, silt from cars humming a bodylength away. Half of it that same earth blown in from the desert south of Tehran, and slaked off houses on the way. Blowing it into piles, runnels, feeble towers, micro-architecture for citydwellers’ brutal shoes to annihilate.
A tiny tube in his mouth, the child was oblivious to the traffic-stuck taxi rider. Who saw that dust caked on his lips and cheekbones, powdering his hair. The tube like a fat spaghetti, that allowed for intricacies and arabesques in that most uncooperative medium. Had he learned the tube from watching an elder at his heroin ritual, she wondered. Gotten it from there, even. His wornsoft shirt flapped on skinny arms in a stifling blastoven breeze. She coughed away the dust, kept looking.
II.
These were no children, though. Men possibly thirty, miserable with no wives, or with them, their sex worn blatantly in their swagger, blissful, dumb. She with her imperfectly concealed light hair, normally a butt for this type, their leers, now going unnoticed. She relished the moment of obscurity, focused through the oppressive sunlight, took in the tableau.
The dry cleaner was away, still on siesta maybe, but business would pick up soon. They would need to finish their game. Whose nature she could almost, not quite yet, see. A child coming from the stores beyond wriggled free of his mother’s grip, came forward, as she did, shavings to a magnet There was laughter, of delight it seemed, or of someone-made-a-fool-of ilk. A flea circus, she thought, noting the small circle of attention, the minute reactions. The mother saw sooner, yanked the child homeward, veilwrap in her teeth, muttering imprecations or godforgiveusses.
A shallow box, a tiny writhing furry thing lay back, tail sweeping under it. On its belly a slit, like a vent but newly minted, mouth of rodent hell. The men gleefuly fingered down its paws, and held a dropper over it. Filled with dry cleaning fluid. Mindful of its poison stroke, careful to await its full effect, drop by dropperful they worked. A dark clot formed in her middle, nausea and anger in equal parts.
Theatre, she thought, or film, as they say here, that’s just film, or something played for an effect. So she was the effect, perhaps, that was her part, so though it seemed as though it could not be, that grown men could not be tormenting a small animal right there, there it was and there she was, the one-who-saw-and-had-to-say. It really was not her business how they got their gratification, she knew, yet no. Would the boys back home do it, if bereft of televisions, loinclothed gladiators, shoulderpadded aggressors, wives to knock on? Was she the emissary from a land of virtue, crossed her mind. Who had any room to talk, who had every right to--? No but just a bystander, surely, maybe not so innocent, who could say, speak out as anyone would but yet no one did.
No one did so it took relatively little time to do the righteous deed. Appeals to shamesense came easily, discovered late and exercised often. Hearing her clunky protest, the word torture as it came mangled out of her mouth, one of the men cried with overlarge how-can-I-help-it gesture, But Khanum! He was eating the clothes! And returned to his labors.
It really took only the time to scan the bent attentive backs, hear the raspy laughs, hear the little beast scraping and thumping, muffled squeaks. Her words were puny, laughable, separate from some other intent. Which drove her boots to the midst of the circle, all politesse aside. On their mercy mission, their gut justice jag. She gave them their papers, released their brute energy, said That’s right. And as she felt the volumes, bloated baby fingers, of mouse organs flattened, took a mental picture. Remembered the featherlike bones of a roast pigeon she’d eaten in Cairo once. Was glad for the width of her heels and the fineness of their construction. The way their edges met the ground. She felt under them the box turning, sliding; under them, small life ebbing. And walked on trembling, not looking back.
–Deborah Maier
Previously published in: Inkwell
©2001 D. Maier All Rights Reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)