Thursday 19 March 2009

Death of a pigeon

Sad to say, the most humane thing to do would be to wring the unfortunate pigeon's neck. That was the advice of Ro, whose office it was sitting outside; but in fact he was overruled and the others rang the RSPCA. By the time the officer arrived, the pigeon had keeled over - not sure if it was already dead, but apparently he looked pretty bemused, shook his head and left. Death was pretty well inevitable - a wing doesn't break itself and it had obviously been through a traumatic time already. Besides, it was a feral town pigeon and they are, actually, vermin. Ro asked his boss if he'd have phoned the RSPCA if it had been an injured rat?

But on humanitarian grounds, that isn't the point. When a wild creature is badly injured it's under considerable stress and possibly in great pain. It is very unlikely to live. Be brave and do the decent thing and kill it.

Anyhoo, the Sage is home and terribly excited to see me. He phoned me in the middle of my lunch meeting - I was sorry to have to turn the phone off unanswered, but really... "Sorry, I didn't know the time", he said. "It was lunch time" I said fruitily.

This evening, I cooked him a lovely dinner. He has poured me several glasses of wine and brought me ice-cream and coffee. He has also kissed me. We are very happy to be together again. I held things together pretty well in his absence, and hardly any disasters happened.

The worst one was that I thought my library books were due back today, rather than last week. I owe 70p per book. 9 books. Blimey.

On a book theme, I'm presently reading The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, which won the Booker last year. Any of you read it? Especially my Indian friends? It's pretty cynical about India - I'd be very interested to know what you think. I'm halfway through at present so haven't reached a conclusion, in either sense, myself.

7 comments:

Dave said...

I haven't read it.

I'm not here, either.

Pat said...

Really bad luck about the library books. Could you plead extenuating circs? Worth a try.
We don't have many occasions apart but I have one coming up and the reunion is always especially sweet.

Anonymous said...

Our library doesn't fine you for overdue books - not even when I was three months late returning mine!
About the poor pigeon: I wouldn't have been able to wring its neck but I know it would have been the best thing to do. Some years ago we took a rabbit suffering from mixomatosis (not sure how you spell that)to the RSPCA because we didn't have the nerve to put it out of its misery.

Z said...

Dave! You're back...oh, you've gone again. Lovely to imagine I've seen you, anyway.

Pat, extenuating circumstances being that I read a previous stamp in the book of 19th Feb as 19th March and didn't notice the stamp I put in myself. I know it's normal for Norfolk, but I don't want to humiliate myself that much.

Sandy, 10p a day doesn't half add up. I have twice killed rabbits with myxomatosis, once with a shovel and once with an airgun. It wasn't bloody, at any rate. I hated it, but it was better than leaving it, and frankly I didn't want to pick up a diseased rabbit.

Dandelion said...

So basically, we're talking about euthanasia, right?

Z said...

Yes indeed. I'm not equating this with human euthanasia and not giving an opinion on this, assisted death or any other similar matter, but animals aren't the same as people and there is a moral dilemma here but it's not the same one.

SuperP. said...

Last semester I paid 80 dollars (which is like 160 pounds, I think), for late textbooks. My own fault, but you have to wonder why parking and book fines are so bloody high at university.. where the general populace is so incredibly poor.. lol!

And, I agree about the decent euthanasia.