George Orwell is best known among the general public for two novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, but to scholars he is equally known for his non-fiction works, especially two essays, Such, Such Were the Joys and Shooting An Elephant. Such, Such... is a scathing account of life at an English boarding school. Shooting An Elephant describes Orwell's own experience as a colonial policeman in Burma. The elephant had gone amok in the market place and killed a boy. As the representative of the British crown Blair, as Orwell was known then, was obliged to respond and though the elephant had ceased to be a menace, the eyes of the gathered crowd were all on him waiting for him to kill the now docile animal. Orwell/Blair captured the despair he felt as he trekked to the market carrying an elephant gun and dreading what was required of him. He described how he felt being hated by a crowd. It's a masterpiece of literature and an example of journalism practiced in its highest form.
This essay is about the killing of a lesser innocent animal and the psychology behind the act of killing. As the title says, the subject is a cat, but not a house cat, rather a barn cat. That's a category unfamiliar to urban and suburban types. We lived on a working dairy farm. Well, some of us worked it, my great uncles, in fact. My parents were solidly middle class, a school teacher and a lawyer, but my mother started life on this farm and returned here to spend her middle age.
The menagerie included about 15 dairy cows, one old bull, and three draft horses. The old bull died and was not replaced. One working horse was deemed redundant and retired off someplace (the slaughter house, probably). A chicken coop full of hens. One scotch border collie dog, who helped drive the cows back to the barn from the pasture at feeding time. Plus a varying number of barn cats. They were semi-feral, never allowed into the house. Once a day at milking time, Uncle Joe put out a pan of milk for the frenzied pack of cats. There was plenty of game for the cats to prey on, mice, moles, voles and the like.
My dim memory offers no names for any among the pack. By contrast, naturally our house cats had names. I remember an all-white male, adopted as an adult by Uncle Freddy who got him from some friend or client in town who could no longer keep him. He came with a name, Mickey Mahoney. Mickey acquired a second name, "Plaster," which described his striking color, unblemished by the slightest smudge of any color other than white. His well domesticated temperament, and the near unanimous affection directed at him by all three generations of our family made Plaster/Mickey a different species than the crowd that lived in the barn.
Roxie, our scotch border collie, being bred to herd, chased three things: cows (much appreciated at the appropriate time), cars (a cause of constant concern) and barn cats (tolerated). A trip to the barn with Roxie always included her dash down the long breezeway, scaring barn cats up the corner posts where they disappeared into holes leading into the haylofts beyond. It was a predictable, noisy, rollicking dash, full of barking and screeching sounds. The ritual surely terrified the cats and satisfied the dog. I don't believe Roxie ever caught one. I can hear it, still, today, 60 years later.
The life of a feral animal must be full of fierce competition and sometimes lethal peril. Even the act of procreation had its violent side, with the female howling and the male holding the female's neck in his teeth. I saw this at least once, and found it mysterious; not understanding what was happening I confused it with fighting. Litters came and went, the kittens dispatched, usually by Uncle Joe, who was determined to keep the barn cat population from exploding. The words "spay" and "neutor" had no place in the lexicon of the life back then on that place. His method of dispatch varied. Sometimes it was it was drowning, sometime quicker and more violent--a hammer, I seem to recall, though I never witnessed either. We kids, principally my sister Sylvia, tried to intervene and save the little darlings, but sooner or later Joe had his way.
When cows came up the huge stone stairs from the cellar below they would all go to their assigned stations, stick their heads through the vertical stanchions, and wait to be locked in when the stanchion closed. Some cows had names, like "Sunshine," and "Moonshine", which were printed above the stall. We had no milking parlor--there were too few cows and too little space to have one--but we had portable milking machines which attached to a vacuum pipe running above the stanchions. The vacuum was supplied by a small gasoline engine which sat chest-high on a palate hanging from the wall. The exhaust pipe from the engine went straight out through the barn wall out into the back yard. A loud purring sound came from the end of the pipe and echoed off the barn wall up into the hayfield rising behind the yard. Hand milking was a last resort when a cow's tits were too irritated to take the suction cups attached to the milk canister.
Milking time was accompanied by a crowd of milling barn cats, waiting for a treat, or even a stream straight from tit to mouth, aimed by Joe when he was hand milking an irritable cow. Sometimes a cat would appear wearing battle scars--a torn ear or a missing patch of fur. One such case was especially dire and it turned ugly when infection set in. One principal of farm life that we lived by dictated that barn cats were not treated for maladies or injuries. Why spend good money on these parasites? Even if one wanted to show pity, catching the poor thing, driving it to the vet, lancing and treating the wounded eye would be pointless, if it was returned to roam the barn, and domesticating a barn cat was not to be considered. Soon it became clear that this cat would not survive much longer.
Another principal we lived by said that animals should not be allowed to suffer. I faintly recall my city-bred, lawyer father describing his sole experience driving a team of horses which ended badly. He had left the team unattended and untethered. While he was a short distance from the wagon the horses spooked and bolted, leaving my father shouting after them as they hurtled down the dirt road at full gallop. One of them veered off the road into the ditch and collapsed when his leg snapped. Dad was told, sternly, to fetch the gun from the house and dispatch the ruined animal. He never drove a team again. Thus it came to me that the right thing to do with this wretched cat was to shoot it--an idea I put to to my elders. Sanction was granted and I prepared to carry out the sentence.
Now it gets complicated, psychologically. I had been given the power of life and death over another living thing. This, itself, is a heady matter. When you exercise this power you are playing God. So, around the age of 10 I was preparing to play God. Part of growing up is enacting milestones of life, some public, like First Communion, Confirmation and enacting a Bar Mitzvah, or the first time you drive a car on a public road. Some are more private, like the first time show your privates to another person not from your family (why else are they called "privates"?); your first deep kiss. Some come with certificates: your diplomas, your driver's license. Others are more private but may convey bragging rights, e.g. "I sat in the governor's chair."
Part of the attraction of these events is the idea that experiencing them is unique and empowering. As an adolescent I consumed countless efforts to imagine how it would feel to have my penis inside a vagina. How does it feel? Really feel? These fantasies gave rise to a variety of experiments of simulation. But simulation is not the real thing. And one imagines that after arriving at the point of real experience, life beyond that moment would be forever different, now that I've really done it.
[Long after these events my father told me, "I was working with Uncle Freddy when something very unusual happened. I told him, 'Well, Fred, that's something you'd remember for a long time, like your first piece of ass.' He snapped back at me: 'I wouldn't know, I never had one!'" Some memorable experiences elude us, despite our efforts to achieve them. A sad situation it would be to find having your first piece of ass appearing in your bucket list as the end approaches.]
This yearning for an imagined transformative experience is not confined to sex. Sometimes the challenge in achieving the experience is based in the courage the act requires. There might even be a measure of this quantity, say, the UCU, the Universal Courage Unit. Take the act of jumping from the rock face into the water below at the Swenson granite quarry just over the hill behind the farm. If it takes 5 UCU to jump from the lowest jumping point, around a 10-foot drop, how many UCU does it take to jump from the next highest perch, around 20 feet from the water? Is it 10 UCU? Or more? Is the UCU/foot a linear relation, so that a 30-foot leap requires 15 UCU? And when does a UCU rating become suicidal? These are questions a boy ponders in one form or another during the progression to adulthood.
Here, at this point in my narrative memory fails to provide details of the actual shooting. Vaguely I recall restraining the animal with a length of twine, looped around its neck. Vaguely I recall the sight of the wretched creature sitting in the barn yard, utterly unaware of what awaited it. I have no specific memory of aiming the .22 rifle, of getting the condemned in my sites, nor do I recall pulling the trigger. No picture of a splattered cat, no sight of a limp corpse, no memory of how the body was disposed of--burial or deposit in the mountains of dung in the barn cellar. I don't think cremation was ever considered. A shovel, a hole and plop; fill it up, tamp it down, somewhere away from the house.
The principal emotion that accompanies this sketchy memory is disgust, just short of shame. I wanted the experience of killing something. I know this yearning was conditioned by my culture, but it has its roots in something much deeper. For me, at that time, the killing was a right of passage. My marksmanship was testament to my growing manhood. Tin cans and paper targets are not enough, your aim must find some living thing and take it down, bring it home. Skin it, maybe, cook it even. Dropping a living being, pushing that fleshy appendage through a sybaritic seam, there's no substitute for the real thing. My total kills from those years include 1 woodchuck, 1 muskrat, several porcupines and one dying, diseased barn cat. I went deer hunting a few times but was spared the traumatic triumph of killing a large animal. [One year we had deer meat in our freezer, but not from a hunting kill. Walt, our game warden friend, pulled in our yard one evening with a dead deer in the bed of his pickup. The deer was a road casualty and Walt was charged with disposing of the carcass. What better way of disposal than to deliver it to our yard? We strung it up from a tree limb and dressed it in the fading light. Walt took some of the quarters, we took the rest to a butcher who cut it into steaks and roasts for packaging and deposit in the cold locker we rented on Main Street.]
This cat was no elephant, but it was a living breathing thing, and my compulsion to apply lethal force to it carries no legacy of colonialism and oppressed people; it comprises just the struggles of a boy trying to grow into a man. And I am no Orwell.
Coda: I consulted my sister, Sylvia Sawyer Miskoe, about this episode. She corroborated most of the details, adding two: the cat was named "Charcoal", and, she told me, with utter confidence, "I shot the cat."