Teaching children to have compassion for animals
I killed a fly the other day. It was hanging out on the rim of the toilet, and I knew, because I’ve known a lot of flies in my life, that its next stop was the tomatoes sitting on the counter in my kitchen.
Later that same day, I was walking my dogs down the street when I saw a little girl sprinkling something on the sidewalk. I’m not usually one to befriend children, as I’m not very good with them, but my curiosity got the best of me.
“Whatcha doin’?” I asked, in my most singsongy, I-have-no-ideahow-to-talk-to-a-10-yearold voice.
“Attracting ants,” came the reply.
“Attracting them?” I said. “Why?”
“Because I like to smush them!” she answered gleefully.
I was horrified. I was so disturbed by the idea of baiting innocent beings with the intention of killing them that I found myself stomping down the street in a rage, yanking my dogs this way and that as they tried to sniff and do their business. It was a bit of unfortunate irony that fortunately I noticed before it went on too long.
But as I mentioned, I killed a fly. And God knows it was not my first killing. Years ago, my husband and I exterminated our house on a regular basis. More years ago, I waged an ongoing war with an endless stream of field mice for whom my kitchen was a 24-hour diner. But every battle I “won” (meaning the mouse died) was accompanied by the profoundly troubling sense of having exerted a terrible power over an innocent creature. At some point, I committed to using only catch-and-release traps, and I can still remember the day my husband carried a mouse to the back of our pasture along with a piece of chocolate cake and an apple, to encourage it to stay in the pasture with a tasty, “balanced” meal. Silly, yes. Kind? So kind.
I’m sorry I didn’t say something to the child — or to the adult on the porch — about the injustice of killing ants that were minding their own business in their own habitat. Instead, I just squealed something about what a mean thing it was she was doing (did I mention about not being good with kids?) and kept going.
Research has proven that children who are cruel to animals often grow up to be violent adults. It’s called the “graduation hypothesis,” and while ant-smushing as a 10-year-old may not be a gateway to interpersonal brutality, I still feel there is something important, crucial even, to be addressed here: the fact that every life — even a teeny life that fits in the crack of a sidewalk — is important to the creature living it, not to mention to the environment it exists within. Their seemingly minuscule life is not ours to lure to us for the sole and express purpose of extinguishing it because to do so gives us a feeling of power and pleasure.
I wish I didn’t have any instances of insectand rodent-killing in my history. I wish I didn’t have any instances of being less than attentive to the family dog when I was a child, or of speaking harshly to my horse when I was a teenager. My guess is that most of us were less than perfect stewards of the animals our parents entrusted us to care for, most likely because we were young and just learning responsibility, still testing the limits of our own power and patience and compassion. If the adults weren’t paying attention — if they assumed we’d be kind and empathetic and gentle without teaching us how to be those things, by both instruction and example, then we might not know how.
I wish I had been more compassionate to that little girl and, instead of calling her actions mean, talked to her about ants. Explained that they have families too, and a desire to get back home to them. Perhaps this is too much anthropomorphizing, but the alternative — seeing ants as so otherworldly as to be insignificant — removes us from our own humanity.
Yes, I killed a fly the other day. It seemed justified at the time, and maybe it really was an act of self-preservation, a defense against the potential spread of disease. But there was nothing in the killing that satisfied, only the feeling that I’d taken a life that mattered to the one living it. If we are going to defend our habitat, then it’s my opinion we should at least not do so recklessly or thoughtlessly.
Talk to your kids. Supervise their interaction with the animals in their environment. Don’t trust them to be responsible for pets until you know for a fact they will be, even when you’re not looking. And never, ever sit idly by when there’s cruelty or malice.
How I wish I could go back to the other day, and in my I-have-no-ideahow-to-talk-to-a-child voice, talked to a child.
Dana Shavin is the author of a memoir, “The Body Tourist.” Her website is Danashavin.com, and she is on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes.