I’ve seen humanity at its best and its worst. In the face of
death and despair, encountering a compassionate soul can be a saving grace; a
guiding light. Death seems to be an enigma that has chosen to walk by my side
for all of my days, yet those kindred souls still seem to emerge in the darkest
of hours. Tonight was a very dark night indeed; a night that consisted of the
two things I despise the most: death and guns. My job as an Animal Control Officer
requires me to be on-call two nights per week and tonight I received the call
I’ve been dreading since my training was completed; the call about a deer hit
by a car but still alive. When I arrived on the scene, three Good Samaritans
had stopped and were showing this fawn, young enough to still have its spots,
some compassion as it lay dying in the road. A good friend of mine, serving in
the Army and currently on a tour-of-duty in Afghanistan, recently emailed and
asked the question, “who’s the dumb ass that gave you and I uniforms and put us
in charge?” Looking back on myself and my Army buddy when we were teenagers, pumping
gas and washing cars in Grants Pass, Oregon, there’s no way we would have ever
guessed that we would someday be trusted, official and up-standing American
citizens. But when I approached these three people on the street tonight, it
was clear that I was respected as the official. But that also meant that I was
the one to decide this fawn’s fate…and it wasn’t a good fate. I sat on the road
next to this little soul, petting it and talking to it while it frantically
made disturbing eye contact with me, and made the phone call to the Bellingham
police department asking them to send an officer to dispatch the deer. The
three people that had stopped (mind you, they were not the people that had hit
the deer. That douche kept driving) sat with me and helped me comfort this baby
that was clearly suffering. Cars either zoomed past us with no concern to the
life leaving this world or they crept by, with their windows down, staring at
the scene unfolding. When Bellingham P.D. arrived, anyone who was not an
official was asked to leave and I was asked to move the fawn to the grassy side
of the road while the cop loaded his massive sniper-looking rifle like it was
just another day at the shooting range. If my time at the Cove taught me
anything, it’s that the sound of death is worse, for me, than the sight of
death. My love of gruesome horror movies has in no way prepared me for the
death rattle of a dying life. Holding the deer down with his foot while it
screamed into the night, the cop instructed me to cover my ears. Two soul-numbing shots later, the
fawn’s body convulsing with the residue of life, I looked down into the gaping
bullet hole that had only moments before held the eye that had looked into
mine. I understand, beyond a doubt, that the choice to have the deer dispatched
was the right one. I understand that death is the ultimate part of life, human
and animal. And I understand that life has made me strong enough to make those
decisions. But life has also made me a deeply compassionate person with
outrageously strong maternal instincts toward animals (and an outrageous lack
of maternal instinct toward kids!) and I will forever remember the sound of
that baby crying for its mother while it suffer at the hands of humans. But I
will also remember the faces of the three strangers that sat in blood next to
me, loving another living creature when it needed love the most.