Animal Abuse

I had just returned from Christmas break and was having my first phone call with Mourad. We spent a little bit of time catching up on our vacations. Now I know that Mourad is Islamic, but I didn't know if there was a Holiday they celebrated on this timing. So I asked him.

Turns out there is a Muslim Holiday that coincided with Xmas this year. It floats, so it was coincidental, but he was able to celebrate it. He had gone back home to Morocco to be with his family, so he could do it in all aspects. I asked him about the celebration. Despite having dated an Islamic girl in grad school I know very little about their holidays. So I asked him what he did. His response was both simple and complex: "I slaughtered a sheep." I wasn't completely sure how he meant this.

So I had to follow up. What does he mean, exactly, when he says that? Is it that he puts an order in with his butcher and gets a nice leg of lamb dropped off in the afternoon? "No. I take a knife and I cut the sheep's throat." He can tell that I am a little shocked, so he tells me this is my cultural diversity for the day!

The trick of the ceremony, he tells me, is explaining it to his children. His two young girls. It used to scare them a bit. I can undersatnd that - I think it would scare me! But he was has been successful with his 6 year old to the point where she asked if she could help this year! Turns out she can't yet, but the fact that she expressed the interest was great.

After I hung up the phone I shared the story with my cube-mates. I expected them to be shocked. But I didn't expect what came next. It would appear that by sharing the Mourad story it opened the door to everyone sharing their animal death experiences. Their very personal experiences!

Michelle went first. She said that a previous year she was working on building a garden. And she had a load of soil dropped off to build it out. As she started to move the dirt from the pile to the garden she discovered that is was populated by two fat moles. So of course she did what any reasonable young lady would do - she bludgeoned them to death and diced them to pieces with her shovel!!!! Trust me, if you ever met Michelle you would swear that she couldn't watch anyone else do this much less do it herself. And yet here she sat, dressed in her professional best, calmly describing the bloody act. Chilling.

It had a different effect on Cathy. Because she immediately launched into a description of the problems she and her husband had with their deck. It seems that after it was built they found that it quickly became a home to a colony of raccoons. I had no idea that they gathered in such numbers, but she shared that there were at least 15 of them there. Big nasty ones too. And you just can't have that with a couple kids running around. So they had to be removed. No big deal. Cathy's husband got himself a trap and caught them one at a time. Piece of cake. But the question is - what do you do with them after they're trapped? Well, if you're Cathy's husband you take the trap to the fountain in front of the house and hold them underwater and wait for them to thrash and scratch until they drown. 15 times in a row. It takes a rare man to be able to do that.

And this is how my Monday morning started. One by one by one stories that shock and amaze from the kindest gentlest people I know. You always hear that people are capable of crazy things in the right situation. You have now heard it from me too - it's true!