I heard Spencer yelling at Spike outside a few minutes ago "Leave it! Spike! Give! Leave it". Spencer came in the house. "Spike has a bird in his mouth," He said. "Is it dead?" I asked. "Not sure, I think it's twitching."
I went out into the garden. Sure enough, there was our sweet, shaggy dog, sitting in the garden with a wing and a foot sticking out of mouth. I put on a glove, grabbed his collar and wrested the bird from his unwilling mouth. He's a very good boy - he wasn't excited about it, but he didn't make trouble.
The bird was a mess. I don't know if Spike had caused it, or if he had found it that way. But it was alive. Much of its feathers has been torn off its belly, which was red and bleeding. Its head was lolling back and forth, I think its neck was broken. It had its eyes tightly close when I pulled it out of Spike's mouth, as it were just waiting for it all to be over. But it opened them when I pulled it into the air. It looked at me. Usually, I find bird's eyes to be so strange, so alien, they hardly seem like they come from the same planet. This bird's eyes were so full of such familiar things: pain, weariness, confusion, hope. It was heartbreaking.
I could hardly bear it. There was clearly no way it was going to survive - it was a shattered wreck. Should I give it back to the dog? I thought, rather incoherently. Should I put it somewhere safe where it can eke out its last breaths? That seemed cruel, it must be in a lot of pain. So I put it down on the flagstones of our patio, and I picked up a big stone - a piece of white marble that decorates the flowerbed - three times the size of the poor creature. Its head was facing the ground so it couldn't see. I held the rock over the bird's head at a height of about two and half feet, and let it fall. It was over instantly.
Then I put the bird's body in the trash, so that Spike, or some other animal wouldn't get at it. It seemed, ironically, the most respectful thing I could do.
My mother had to do something similar with a baby squirrel when I was a kid. She kept trying to get our cat (who had stolen the squirrel from it's next) to finish what it had started, but the cat refused. I remember knowing at the time, that what my mom was doing was kind and generous.
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