R.I.P. Conscience

Today started out awful. The fact that I didn't get any sleep last night didn't help to control my reactions to the morning's happenings either.

So there I was, yawning and dilly-dallying on my office PC whilst trying to look busy and important when commotion struck. The entire department started shrieking and running around like hell had suddenly opened up at their feet. I craned my neck over my short cubicle wall to see what the Kraeken looked like (because that's what they sounded like they'd just seen) when I realized through snatched bits of scream that they were running from none other than a rat. "Eeeyah! Meeyek! Meeyek!" they cacophonied, in keys that would make any 1st soprano green with envy.

'Oh jeez', I thought. Typical uneducated, pathetic response towards something that ideally should be running away from THEM. I began to roll my eyes in amusement, but stopped halfway when I saw one of my colleagues carrying a waste paper basket that was setting everyone else off. I swear if people could have jumped out of the window to get away from that basket, they would have. I understood that this basket did indeed house that ungodly creature that was making people act like a bomb had gone off. I wanted to reach in and congratulate it for this unbelievable power it had - to strike that much fear into mortal human souls by just a twitch of its whisker.
But then, as I was getting closer for a look, I heard something else that stopped my heart cold.
'Yuck... it's half dead. Eeyah look at it trying to move."

At that point, my nostrils flared and I saw red. For weeks I'd been debating and opinionating with colleagues on the injustice of having rat poison strewn around office. There was this box of poison that I tried many a time to destroy, simply because I am of the view that of all the ways to kill a rat (if you must), poison is by far the cruellest and vilest way to do it. Why? Because what those cute little pink and blue pellets do are act as blood thinners that make the little creatures bleed internally till they burst. Their organs will deteriorate bit by painful bit while they still remain alive to feel every milisecond of that agony, and the poison will also parch them. With time and water drunk out of thirst, they die. In the most horrible, painful way. It is a far more humane thing to kill them with a severe blow to the head or let a trap sever their neck, or even knock them out with cyanide than to give them this stuff. And that has been my argument point for along time now.... not that anyone cared for it.

With smoke coming out of my ears I peeked into the basket, and then nearly screamed myself. Not out of fear, but pure indignation at what I saw. This wasn't the large, viscious, ugly pestilence that everyone was shouting about. It was a beautiful baby mouse, a palm-sized ball of soft brown fur and enormous eyes with a pastel pink nose, delicate ears and tiny paws, suffering and dying.
As I stared at it, it stared back at me, immobilized out of both fear and pain. I swear I saw tears in its eyes.

There was a moment where time stopped and I ceased to hear anything around me. The baby mouse and I held each others' gazes and I could almost hear its dying gasps and failing hearbeat in my mind. Then reality swept in and I saw my colleague swinging the basket towards the window, from where he intended to drop the dying animal down two floors.

I don't know how it happened, but that basket ended up in my hands almost instantly, and I heard myself shouting obscenities at the shrieking harpies around me. I could see some of them itching to laugh out loud at my anguish, but I didn't care. They were too dumb to fathom that rat or no rat, diseased or not, this was a life. Like any other life. It was a living, breathing, feeling soul that was now writhing in an agony that only I seemed to empathize with at that point. "Drown it!" they kept shrieking. "Make it drink water and it'll die quicker" yet others adviced, softening a bit at the sight of my purple face. I rushed the mouse, basket and all, out of the office to a large canal-like drain outside.

Once outside, I stepped into the drain, reached into the basket and took the little baby into my hands. It could hardly move, and I could see its little chest palpitating in an effort to breath. I stroked it's pretty baby head to calm it down and let it know it was in hands that cared, and not those that hated. It kept looking at me trustingly, willing me to ease its pain. I didn't know what to do, except start bawling and crying like a newborn in the middle of that damned drain. That must have been some sight for the passers by. In the midst of the sobbing, I offered it some water but it refused. So I found a shady, cool patch under some growing weeds on the side of the drain, and laid it down to die in as much peace as I could offer it. But when I tried to take my hands away, one perfect pink paw reached out and held on to my pinky, not wanting me to go. You wouldn't believe it unless you'd been there. Cue more uncontrollable sobbing, that had by now collected a sizeable audience of curious trishaw drivers and amused workmen from across the street. Not wanting to watch its suffering anymore and not knowing what else I could do, I left it there and went back upstairs, to spend some time in the office bathroom using up an entire tissue box on my snot and tears. Soon after, two colleagues who thought me strange but were concerned for my mental state nevertheless, made me sit in the kitchen with them for about an hour and talk my sorrows out to them. We discussed the value of life - any life-, and how cruel humans can be. After about an hour, when I had composed myself enough to not look like a batty woman crying over a rodent, I went down with one sympathetic friend to find my (yes... I had claimed ownership by then) baby mouse dead. The water in the drain had risen upto his nose, and in his immobile state, he had drowned in it's mud. I took it's broken and stiff little body back into my hands and buried it in the office carpark. Then I went back to my seat and cried some more.

But why should you care about this entire spiel, you ask. It's a damned rat. That's what you do to rats, you argue. They carry disease, you explain.

All true... but do you go around killing humans who are infectious too? Shall we poison the next case of leprosy we see? Have all those millions of Indians who feed and worship rats in their temples died of rat disease? Did this baby mouse even HAVE disease in him? And what gives us the right to use a device like poison and kill so inhumanely anyway?

Don't be a hypocrite, you say. You eat meat, don't you Dramaqueen? Aren't you endorsing murder then?

I wish I knew why I can't convert to vegetarianism, I answer. I will, one day. But killing for food is not quite the same as killing for sport or for hate. Or were you going to eat the baby mouse?

Which book of rules sorts out lives into the categories of valuable and disposable? Why are animals less deserving of the right to live, or quality of life, than humans? Why must we respect one death and not the other?

You can call me a raving loony, but you know... as much as you don't understand me right now, I don't understand you. I wish I could open your eyes and make you see yourself the way I see you.

You'd be disgusted too.

My only solace is that someday, every soul that has caused unjust suffering, be it towards a rat or a person, will suffer equally if not more. I have that much trust in God and the universe.

And right now, in my ridiculous state of mind, I am willing that baby mouse to reincarnate into the next generation's animal rights activist.