Two-Dollar Word, Medium Rare

Posted By Les Conklin on Sep 17, 2015

Grand Prize Winner, 2015 Summer Fun Write Stuff Contest

By Robert G. Rogers

“Scorpion” by Kevin Spatt

I spotted him at 7:20 this morning.

I was rushing to a 7:30 meeting, had opened my garage door, and was about to hop in my car, back up, and speed off.

But I couldn’t. Because of him.
The “him” (which, for all I know, may have been a “her”) was a long-tailed,
translucent scorpion, scurrying to hide as he sensed the crunch of my advancing footsteps on the slick epoxy flooring.

I was onto him faster than he could scamper.

And what did I do?

With the gentleness of a cub-tending mama bear, I shooed the repulsive critter with the sole of my shoe onto my driveway. Only I realized then that if he stayed there he’d get squished when I backed up my car. So, and despite my tardiness, I went back inside, searched out a broom and dust pan, returned, scooped up the little guy, and safely deposited him onto my side yard. He was good to go.

I ended up later than late for my meeting.

But why?

Because I don’t kill things. I can’t.

No critter is too icky, poisonous, or hideous to not earn from me the reprieve of a death sentence that, for sure, would be unflinchingly inflicted by just about anyone else. People like me offer lots of knee-jerk reasons to explain themselves. Animal love is one. Other oft-used logic holds that the coyotes, critters, and serpents that find their ways into our living spaces were here long before us and will probably thrive here again when we, the Homo sapiens, are long gone.

I, for one, soft-hearted and shielded from harsh worldly realities as I am, think needless killing cuts across the grain of human nature. Obviously, my take doesn’t square with that of many others.

Truly, what in the world is at work in the minds of those of us who go out of our ways to spare the lives of critters, large and small? Methinks it’s the same thing that makes me choke up every time I watch the 1955 animated movie, “Lady and the Tramp.”

It’s anthropomorphism.

Talk about a two-dollar word.

“In this illustration by Milo Winter of Aesop’s fable, ‘The North Wind and the Sun’, an anthropomorphic North Wind tries to strip the cloak off of a traveler.” Courtesy of Wikipedia

What it stands for, of course -and that with which mortals such as I are afflicted -is the tendency (if not obsession) to ascribe human traits to all living beings.

What about the other folks, those who slurp their cocktails oblivious to the slowly drowning wasps in their pools? Or who stomp the wayward scorpion, ant, or cockroach, as if they’re contributing to the riddance of detested species? Or who -to bring all of this up to date -purposely maim a gigantic jungle vertebrate and track it till it dies for purposes of decapitation, taxidermy, and macho over-the-fireplace show-and-tell.

I can’t fathom what instincts propel them.

Among other things, these people latch onto God’s proclamation that man enjoys dominion over the world’s fish, birds, livestock, wild animals, and other groundcrawling creatures.

The dominion of which God speaks in Genesis, I prefer to think, does not equate to exploitation, but instead to stewardship.

But wait. Here comes another big word: paradox.

How do I proceed to dinner tomorrow at some manly eatery, and order a broiled rib eye steak -medium rare, please -that I know full well has been gruesomely excised from the carcass of a barely dead farm animal that was every bit, in life, as deserving of my anthropomorphic, transferring tendencies as all the other sensate creatures of the world?

Well, I look the other way, don’t I? Maybe I don’t think about it. Must I become a vegetarian to escape being branded a hypocrite?

I would argue I’m not a hypocrite, that there are distinctions to be made between senseless, inhumane snuffing out oflife and humane execution of fish, fowl, and other animals for human consumption.

Until all these mixed feelings and tendencies get figured out, just remember the one big word, anthropomorphism.