Peter Mladinic

Perfectly Healthy

Have you ever seen a perfectly healthy
dog or cat hoisted to a steel table and
given a needle in its neck and killed?
I haven’t.  But someone has.  Someone has
had to do it.  Someone has had to take the
dead dog or cat from the steel table and
put it in a plastic bag and take it to a
freezer to let it lie there till it’s taken away
like the garbage it has been turned into by
Human hands.

Sure, the dog or cat is scared being
placed on the steel table, it’s, say, terrified
but it’s not like a human being terrified.
Animals don’t feel, at least not the way we
humans feel.  Animals are different.  And
when someone puts a needle in its neck
and watches the life, if they care to look,
go out of its eyes, that’s not killing, not
murder.  The formerly perfectly healthy
dog or cat was euthanized.  It was put
down.  That’s nice, a nice way of putting it,
euthanized, it sounds soothing.  We put
the dog to sleep.  Sure, there wasn’t
anything wrong with the dog, but there
Were so many and how could we keep
them all, and no one wants them.  We take
them one by one, hoist them, because
they are struggling, and put them to sleep,
put them down.  We euthanize the
perfectly healthy dog or cat.  Really, we did
the animal a favor.  After all, death was
better than its living in a cage in a room
crowded with cages, where it would have
to be fed and cleaned up after, and we’d
have to pay someone to do that.

Nothing wrong with killing the perfectly
healthy dog or cat.  It’s the right thing to
do.  After all, it’s not like killing a person.

You think, before they are taken to the
room and hoisted onto the steel table,
they know, they know what’s about to
happen, and even the other dogs and cats
in cages in the crowded room, as the dog
or cat is being taken away—they know,
too?  You think they all bark and yelp and
whine in panic, out of fear?

Animals’ fear is different from human fear,
animals are different.  They don’t feel,
really, at least not the way we feel.  So
don’t upset yourself, it’s just an animal.
After it’s dead it’s not like the corpse of a
dead person; it’s garbage someone who’s
paid a decent wage will throw away.
Someone’s paid to stick the needle in the
neck, and someone else is paid to throw
out the garbage.  That’s how it is, how it
should be.  We can’t keep all these
perfectly healthy animals no one wants.
Who would want them?  How could they in
any way better people’s lives?

Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.  An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico