Big game

Last night, in a state of restless half-sleep, I heard the sound of two gunshots going off, seemingly right outside the bedroom window. Throughout most of my solidly lower-to-middle middle class existence, I've been fortunate enough not to hear gunshots all that often -- the exception being the W.T.O. riots in Seattle circa my sophomore year of high school, and I'm pretty sure those were rubber bullets -- but the sound was unmistakable: like the swat of a rug-beater on a dusty carpet, but amplified tenfold, with a sinister reverb you never hear in the movies. Idly, I wondered who on earth could be firing a weapon in the middle of downtown Berkeley, but at that point, I was too far gone with sleep to care.

Turns out, the shots were from a police officer tasked with gunning down a wild cougar that had inexplicably wandered into our quiet suburban neighborhood. When this story was related to me the following day, what surprised me wasn't so much the cougar prowling around the organically stocked dumpsters of Chez Panisse. That much seemed perfectly reasonable to me, given that mountains are close and "twice-cooked kid goat with cumin, ginger, eggplant, and chickpeas" is enough to draw in the most skittish and reclusive of carnivores. What surprised me was that, even in this hippie/yuppiefied town, the only effective method the local law could come up with for dealing with a wild animal was extermination. Weren't there some tranq darts lying around in their Black Marias, or some tear gas left over from 60s student protests?

I kept thinking about this as I heard about the crazy Discovery Channel standoff that also happened today. Obviously, it's dangerous to compare the killing of a wild animal to the killing of a person, but even without PETA-style intellectual convolution, the logic from the point of view of the trigger finger feels exactly the same to me: This is a wild, unpredictable creature. It may harm someone. It needs to die to let others live. Viscerally, I'm uncomfortable with this logic. I don't like imagining myself in the situation of the police officer whose job it is to make that decision and, pun intended, execute it. I don't like the place a mind has to go in order to dispassionately, instantaneously make that choice. And I certainly don't like the dark stain that inevitably remains imprinted in some corner of that mind after the dust has settled and the body of some unfortunate hunted creature lays prone and motionless like a limp rag. One would say, then, that I'm clearly on the side of deontological ethics, favoring process and means over and above any ends they enact. Thinking deeper about the situation, though, I suppose that's precisely what draws me to utilitarianism. It's not a visceral, passionate reaction, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder for a human mind to make sense of it. But maybe we as a species need to put ourselves in more difficult situations, and to avoid solving them with meely-mouthed platitudes about kindness and love and sanctity of life, especially when it's so clear that our entire society is built on anything but.