Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1893 — KILLING THROUGH PITY. [ARTICLE]

KILLING THROUGH PITY.

Even the Meanest of Things Love to Prolong Their Lives. An old mangy cat, hunted out of its abode no doubt by its owner, had established itself In our street, on the footpath of our house, where a little November sun once more warmed its body, says Pierre Loti in “A Book of Pity and Death.” It is the custom with certain people whose pity is a selfish pity thus to send off as far away as possible and “lose” the poor animals they care neither to tend nor to see suffer. All day long it would sit piteously in the corner of a window-sill, looking, oh, so unhappy and so humble, an object of disgust to those who passed, menaced by children and by dogs, in continual danger, and sickening from hour to hour. Its poor head was eaten up with disease, covered with sores, and almost without fur. but its eyes, which remained bright, seemed to reflect profoundly. It must have felt frightful bitterness the worst of all sufferings for a cat—that of not being able to make its toilet, to lick its fur, and to comb itself with the care cats always bestow on this operation. To make its toilet! I believe that to a beast, as to a man. this is one of the most necessary distractions of life. The poorest, and most diseased, and the most decrepit animals at certain hours dress themselves up, and as long as they are able to do that have not lost everything in life. But to be no longer able ts care for their appearance because nothing can be done before the final moldering away,that has always appeared to me the lowest depth of all the supreme agony, Alas! for those poor old beggaitf'Wfto befoe their death harchrcd &nd. filth on heir faces, their bodies warred with vounds that no longer

can be dressed, the poor, diseased animals for whom there is no laager even pity. I ended its life with a narcotized cup. The annihilation of a thinking animal, even though it be not a human being, has in it something to dumfound us when one thinks of it. It is always the same revolting mystery, and death besides carries with it so much majesty that it has the power of giving sublimity in an unexpected, exaggerated form to the most infinitesimal scene from the instant its shadow appears. At this moment I appeared to myself like some black magician arrogating to myself the right of bringing to the suffering what I believed to be supreme peace, the right of opening to those who had not demanded it the gates of the great night. Cats, as the people say, have their souls pinned to their bodies. In a last spasm of life it looked at me across the half sleep of death. It seemed even all at once to comprehend everything. “Ah, then it was to kill me and not assist me. I allow it to be done. It is too late. lam falling asleep.” In fact I was afraid that I had done wrong. In this world, in which we know nothing of anything, men are not allowed to even pity intelligently. Thus, mangy tabby’s look, infinitely sad even while it descended into the putrefaction of death, continued to pursue me as with a reproach: “Why did you interfere with my destiny? I might have been able to drag along for a time—to have had still some little thoughts for another week. There remained to me sufficient strength to leap on the window sill, where the dogs could no more torment me, where I was not cold. In the morning when the sun came there I had some moments which were not unbearable, looking at the movements of life around me, interested in the coming and going of other cats, conscious at least oi something; while now I am about to decompose and be transformed into I know not what, that will not remember. Soon I shall no longer be. ” I should have recollected, in fact, that even the meanest of things love to prolong their lives by every means, its, utmost limits of misery, preferring anything to the terror oi being nothing, of no longer being.