What cartoons about talking fish will do to you

I was a much better liar when I was a child. I could lie without feeling even a twinge of guilt. I was a much better thief when I was a child. Stealing, the very few times I did steal, was matter of fact. I knew, in theory that it was wrong but there was no internal feeling of morality associated with it. I was a much better killer when I was a child. My father use to take me fishing and I remember having no problem skewering the live worm onto the hook, no problem pulling the hook out of the fish, no problem gutting and and cleaning the fish. All that before I was ten years old.

Around the time I was ten years old, I remember a day when a gopher ran into my family's garage and the more my father tried to shoo it out with a broom, the more it fought back by hissing and screeching - at least that's what I remember it sounding like - and refusing to be moved out of its corner. My father, having never dealt with wildlife before, being from a place where wildlife had been wiped out long ago, didn't know what to do. He thought this little creature was a threat, maybe would bite, maybe had rabies. So, he called the neighbours.

Three of them showed up. One had a baseball bat, one had an axe and one had a handgun. Now even though I was only ten and didn't have a highly developed sense of sardonic humour, I knew there was something sadly comedic about the sight of those three men with their hammer horror weapons of metal and wood going after a furry little creature smaller than a typical house cat, and even though at that age when I was not perturbed by killing, I knew there was something awfully, pathetically wrong about grown men getting excited over killing a cornered and scared animal. Even my father, who still wanted the gopher out of the garage, looked like he now regretted calling the neighbours over.

Part of me wanted to stay to see the action but another part of me felt sickened, not so much by the inevitable killing but by the atrocious injustice of it all and so I walked away to my neighbour's front yard waiting for it to be over. And when I heard the gunshot, once again part of me wanted to go back to the garage and see the blood and guts finale but another part of me just became sad so I stayed away. I stayed away the rest of the afternoon, making sure they had more than enough time to clean up any evidence of their activities.

Many years later, when I was living in China, my girlfriend at the time and I went to the market and bought a dozen small fish to make a fish stew which my students had given me a recipe for. The fish were freshly caught and kept on ice at the market stall and were still alive. Even after we got them home, they were still alive. We flipped a coin to see who would kill and who would clean. I lost.

I brought the fish along with a sharp knife out onto the balcony. I picked up one fish I thought seemed dead and brought the knife up to its belly. The fish squirmed. I wigged out. I dropped the fish and it landed on the concrete floor and then flipped itself off the edge of the balcony onto the street below where it probably got run over by a truck.

Eventually, I did manage to kill the rest of the fish but it took me an hour to work myself up to it. I don't really know why I forced myself to do it other than I thought there was something wrong with me that I couldn't do then something which I could easily have done when I was a child.

After that, the fish soup didn't taste so good.

The last time I think I intentionally killed something, other than a biting insect, was about twenty years ago when I dropped a lobster, either barely living or just dead, into a vat of boiling water.

Nowadays I pick up stray spiders inside the house and let them go outside; I set live traps for the mice so I can release them elsewhere far away - and I know they probably won't survive the displacement but a death removed and not directly by my hand is a death I can more easily ignore; and, I volunteer with shelter dogs to help ease their anxiety in their transition from their previous lives to their hopeful new ones and I do that in part for the reward of their companionship but also in part because, like many others, like many of you, I feel an emotional ache when I think about even their present lack of joy never mind their past suffering and future uncertainty.

I don't know if this means I've become soft or if I've become civilized. I don't know.