On killing a small bird
The other day I found a small bird that was trying to get away from the neighbor’s cat. Unfortunately I got there too late to prevent the bird being harmed — its tail feathers had been ripped out, it had a nasty wound on the back of its neck, and it had a mangled left wing. It was terrified and desperately trying to get away from its attacker. The cat was obviously going to take its time dispatching the bird and I knew that I was going to end up performing euthanasia. I don’t even know what kind of bird it was. It was sparrow-sized and almost black.
I picked it up and it immediately seemed to calm down, as if it recognized that I was less of a threat than the cat was, and I felt fraudulent, given my intention. While wild birds can become very stressed when in contact with humans they can also be very trusting. When I lived at Dhanakosa Retreat Centre in Scotland I’d often have wild birds come and sit on my shoulder or perch on my hand. One time a bird came to one of us looking for help for her mate, who had become trapped in a building.
I kept the bird out of sight as I walked back to my house; the local kids, including my daughter, were playing outside my front door and I didn’t want next door’s five-year-old to decide she wanted to try to nurse the bird back to health. There’s no point creating an attachment that you then intend to violate.
I’d decided that the quickest and least unpleasant way to kill the bird was to break its neck with a ruler. I took the bird and the ruler out onto the back deck, where there was a good, hard surface.
The first time I blew it. I placed the bird on the deck and as I was putting the ruler in position for a quick push downwards I prematurely touched the bird, which panicked and tried to hop away. The second time I was more decisive and pushed down as hard as I could. The bird jerked and struggled for a few long seconds and then it stilled and its eyes went dull.
I hope those seconds of thrashing were just reflexes and that the death wasn’t painful. But I have a feeling I caused pain and fear. The whole time I was saying “I’m sorry” under my breath. Or maybe I was just thinking it. I continued to say those words as I took a spade and buried the tiny body under a clod of earth.
It felt horrible.
The first precept of Buddhism is “I undertake the training principle of abstention from taking life.” I’m a vegetarian. I generally have a catch and release policy for insects that I find in the house. I gave up a career as a veterinarian because it wasn’t possible to avoid killing in that job. So why did I kill the bird?
The chances of it living were close to zero. I couldn’t fix its broken wing. I didn’t know what its diet was, but the pointed beak made me think it was an insect-eater. It would likely die of stress and hunger over a period of days. It didn’t even occur to me to find someone else to do the deed. I thought it was best that if death was to come it should come quickly.
A Buddhist friend once suggested, while I was struggling with the issue of having to kill as a veterinarian, that when we put an animal out of its misery we’re actually putting ourselves out of our own misery. I’m sure there’s some truth in that. It’s painful to watch an animal die slowly. But I’m inclined to think that the precepts can become contaminated by a desire for “ethical purity” where we don’t want to dirty our hands. Mahayana Buddhism, critical of this tendency, put forth hypothetical situations such as a Buddha killing a madman in order to prevent him from causing great harm to many other people. The Mahayana teaches compassion and I don’t think they were really advocating harm. I think they were saying, “Look, some Buddhists are so caught up in wanting to be ethically pure that they’d let others die rather than take on the bad karma of reluctantly using force to save other people. And shying away from difficult actions is itself an ethical defect. Ethics involved thinking about others, not about keeping your karma clean.”
I feel sympathetic to the Mahayana view. There’s a Pali canon text where the Buddha points out that it’s better for an aware person to commit a harmful act than for an unaware person to do so, because less harm is caused. The image used is of picking up a red hot iron ball. A person who is unaware will pick up the ball and mishandle it, because they don’t know what they’re doing. A person who does this with awareness will take the appropriate safeguards to make sure they don’t cause themselves or others unnecessary harm.
So I tried to kill the bird with as much awareness and compassion as possible. And afterward i tried to be mindful of the unpleasant feeling I had in the pit of my stomach, not letting myself wallow in self pity or mask the feeling.
Today I feel fine. I don’t even recall having unpleasant dreams. I think I did the right thing.
2 Responses to “On killing a small bird”
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Published: Oct 23 2008
This post reminded me of the story about the two monks who came to a river, and met a woman who needed help crossing. So one of the monks lifted her and carried her across. Hours later, the second monk was still talking about it, about how they (in their sect) were not allowed to touch women. (In the end, the monk #1 told him to shut up, in a very polite Buddhist way, of course)
I think when you leave a being in suffering in order to avoid breaking a rule, karma or otherwise, you are just passively contributing to the suffering of the world.
I think you did the right thing, and more importantly, you did it with compassion, awareness, and respect. (As an anatomy nerd, I would safely bet that those twitches in the end really were just spasms produced by the severed spinal column.)
Thanks for your kind comments.
The usual version of the story is that monk #1 says to monk #2, “I put the woman down at the far side of the stream. Are you still carrying her?” As you suggest, it’s another Mahayana attempt to point to the spirit of the precepts.