Experience of helplessness; only able to offer what I imagine to be the comfort of well-meaning contact and physical support. Attempt to use those things to bridge inter-species divide. Are those merely my human projections? Does a city-bred rock pigeon feel comfort in the agonies of a cruel, slow and brutal death whilst being held by a bipedal mammal?
Does mercy killing exist? Did that being want it's death experience left untampered? Or would it have asked to be killed quickly if it could do so in a way I could understand?
I could not read the language of those eyes-- I could only see the rapid change from a fighting, living being (so very, very much alive) to the extinguishment, the abandonment. The departure too quick to witness, I could only see the moment before, and then the aftermath; the absence of life.
How different a body when the spirit has left it, whatever spirit is. Life force? Electric impulses live on beyond death of brain and cessation of sentient life. What accounts for that change? Where does that light in the eyes go? What is that light? What makes that change of posture, of attitude, of scent, so universal? And what gives us the right?
Attempts at mercy:
Head smashed in, lower beak detached from upper. Smatter of thick, dark blood and esophagus. Dead eyes half closed with nictitating membrane, so elegantly hidden during life, becoming like a gaudy accident, an embarrassing swath of fabric.
What fucking gives us the right?
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I will never forget the way it feels to hold a living being as it dies; those precious individual struggles I have witnessed. The colour of those eyes; moving wildly, rolling, flashing, blinking. I will never forget those fights and I will try to never take my own moments for granted; when giving up would be so easy, would seem a relief--that isn't the way of the animals I have held in their death. None of them have ever given up; instead, they have always fought through what must have been enormous agony in their efforts to keep the vehicle of their bodies working to sustain the power and the treasure of their life.
And I have no right to cry.
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