Success!

Success at last! After a week of being taunted by a very clever mouse, he has been dispatched! Thanks to the husband who carefully set traps around in my car. I tried but snapped the crap out of my fingers and gave up the thought of ever having a nice quiet ride into work ever again.

Now come the hard questions. Did it hurt when he died? Does he have a family waiting for him? Why was he so cute? Aren't they supposed to be vile and disgusting? It makes it easier to kill them when they are. Why am I feeling badly about killing a mouse? I'm going to make a big jump here, bear with me. I think it's empathy. We can argue until the cows come home about whether the mouse had feelings. Some would say that animals can't feel, that humans are the only creatures intelligent enough to feel. But I disagree. My best friend growing up had a yellow lab named Sarah. We would catch her looking at herself in the mirror in my friends bedroom and when we called her on it, she would crinkle up her ears and drop her head and you could see embarrassment on her face. I have friends whose cats ignore them when they've been gone for a few days. They are mad that they were left alone. I watched a video segment about a young leopard who makes her first kill. It was a baboon. When the cat takes the dead baboon up into a tree it realizes that there is a day old baby clinging to it's dead mother. Instead of killing the baby too, the leopard picks the baby up and starts to lick it and cuddle up with it. With cameras everywhere and YouTube showing all the videos that people take, you don't have to look far for examples in nature of empathy.

Unfortunately, they are getting harder to find in society. Heinz Kohut said, empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. I can put myself into the "life" of the mouse in my car. But how many times do I put myself into the lives of the people around me? I could argue that the mouse is easy to be empathetic towards. For one, he's a mouse. So he'll never disappoint me. And so often the people around me can. But what kind of relationship is it if there isn't some disappointment. Some sadness. That all leads to growth and in turn better relationships. The one with the mouse is static. Especially since the mouse is dead. So I take that thought away from this whole ordeal. To try to be more connected to the people around me and less so to the things that can't react back to me.

RIP Ethan"the mouse" Hunt.