Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

License to Kill

179 License to Kill Only eighteen wood ticks: not bad, after a long May day’s birding in West Virginian woods.The first, adorning my sleeve during beers in the conference center lounge, and the last, plucked from my neck on the way to dinner (after a shower!), went free. But the others, gathered in a tumbler during my tick-check, joined the fetid flow toward the sewage treatment plant. I considered walking them back to the woods, but having already disrobed and de-ticked,I declined.Had they been deer ticks,releasing them would have been reckless in a time of spreading Lyme disease: as one East Coast friend says,“Kill ’em! And kill their filthy spirochetes too!” But even though wood ticks are relatively innocuous, it didn’t seem considerate to pop them right outside the window of Rachel Carson Lodge. So, with more misgivings than most people would consider reasonable, I flushed them down the toilet. My action was optional, but many takings are not. To live, we must kill.Almost all animals do it, even detritivores such as clown fish, cellulose feeders like termites, and dead-matter converters like dung and carrion beetles,all of which wreak collateral damage on microorganisms.Herbivores take life just as carnivores do, only vegetable rather than animal. Pruning can enhance plants, as when light grazing strengthens roots; but heavy foragers,like mountain pine beetles in outbreak mode,may reduce viability, even unto death. Plant predators that consume chiefly leaves, fruits, pollen, nectar, or other expendable parts still gobble a certain by-catch of bacteria and tiny larvae.The fact is, it is difficult to occupy space as a living being without taking the lives of others—altogether impossible for large animals such as we. Some principled people have tried to opt out of the contract of life living off life.There have been the Albert Schweitzers and the storied Jains, followers of a dharmic faith who believe all living things possess souls and should be held in equal regard. Some Jains reputedly wear masks to TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 180 avoid breathing microbes and sweep the path before them to prevent the deaths of any insects on which they might tread.We all know people who “wouldn’t hurt a flea,” at least as far as volition goes. But volition goes only so far. All such conceits are ultimately in vain, if the objective is to kill nothing. Thoughtful people can take fewer lives than those who stomp every spider without a thought, or worse.Yet there remains the matter of exerting our weight upon the earth, so richly populated with tiny lives. Of eating, whether cattle, pigs, or krill, grains, beans, or spuds, butchered or harvested by the diners or their paid proxies. Of clothing, since cultivating cotton and hemp means displacement (read:killing) of prior residents with pesticide and plow,and the harvest exerts its own toll.And of shelter,because putting up houses means taking down trees. Our transportation, whether by Hummer or Prius,train or plane,mines living mountainsides for metals. Communications and energy?Try mountaintop removal for coal,open-pit mines for copper, salmon-stream dams, and the entire oil imbroglio, none of them noted for their nonlethal qualities. But what I want to get to is the killing we do directly—not by dint of mere existence, but of our own volition.We may hunt beasts, rototill worms, dig or spray weeds, slap mosquitoes, trap mice, or swallow—study the word—antibiotics.We each have our own threshold for taking life.A person at one end of the continuum might join the Jains,pay dues to PETA, or espouse (and try to live up to) some Schweitzerian “reverence for life.” Organic gardeners cause much less mayhem than conventional growers do with their entomophobic, slay-and-spray ways, but the pesticide-free still dispatch slugs and slaughter chard. Fly-swatters come next, then maybe crawdad-catchers, lobster-eaters, and clam-diggers.Those who can get past the backbone and vertebrate eyes might fish, or go whole hog with warm blood by shooting game birds,squirrels,or deer.From there it’s quite a leap to trophy hunters,like our acquaintance who dimmed last year’s Christmas spirit with a card depicting himself, his wife, his gun, and the African lion he’d just shot. So-called “pest control” might start with termites and roaches and move on to mice, moles, packrats, coyotes, and then...