A good thing and a bad thing happened today.
While driving home, I saw a Box Turtle in the middle of the busy State Highway. On the side of the road the turtle was heading toward was a sheer rock face, so even if the turtle managed to survive to get to the roadside, it would have had nowhere to go. Realistically, its chances of surviving the trip across the road were pretty close to zero -- especially since it would've had no choice but to turn around and go
back across the road.
So, I quickly found a place where I could safely get off the road, walked back, and got the turtle. I figured I'd take it to the campus and release it on the mountainside above the main campus, where the Faculty Housing is located.
As it's Spring Break, just-about everyone is gone, but I wasn't going to let a little thing like
that interfere with my on-going campaign to convince everyone on campus that snakes, lizards, and other "creepy" creatures aren't "bad" and that they shouldn't be persecuted. As it happened, my favorite 8-year-old was home, so she petted the turtle for awhile, then I took it on up the mountainside to a nice area near the Faculty Housing, where I could set it free.
After I set the turtle free, I encountered a Chipmunk. Unfortunately, it was dragging its hind legs behind it. I've seen this sad situation before; sometimes a squirrel or chipmunk will dart out in front of a car and hit one of the tires hard-enough to break its own back. There was nothing I could do for it, so I figured that the kindest thing would be to put it out of its misery. I returned to my car, because I normally keep a pair of work gloves in the trunk. But they weren't there. Dangit. I must have taken them out to use for something or other, and forgotten to put them back.
I had been intending to give the poor Chipmunk a quick, painless death via cervical dislocation. I don't exactly enjoy doing that sort of thing, but I know how to do it, and I have occasionally dispatched some unfortunate animal that way. But I wasn't going to do it without a pair of gloves, since the poor animal would almost-certainly have bitten me.
So, I pushed the Chipmunk off the path and left it in the woods. It wasn't kindness on my part, it was cowardice. It's just a question of whether the poor creature dies of starvation before a predator finds it. I could have given it a quick death, but I wasn't willing to risk being bitten by an animal that might have an infectious disease and I certainly wasn't willing/able to kill it by smashing it with a rock or some such thing.
