That manga is so true. Like it or not, we all have a moral limit on what we can kill, directly anyway.

Reminds me of one “unfortunate” kill I did, when I was young. My parents went to the summer house every summer when school was out (they were both teachers), so I had to follow. There wasn’t much to do since there was no electricity and no phone (really nothing but books and the forest). The only electric thing we had was a radio, and it ran on a car battery.

So yeah, I had an air gun, the kind that shoots lead pellets (.177) so I pretty much shot everything that was around. Quickly got to the point that killing frogs was ok, in the small lake near the house. Wouldn’t normally kill anything else tho, except insects, somehow they don’t get good rap when you live in the woods, lol. There was that one episode my dad allowed me to shoot squirrels, since they were invading the roof of the house and build their nest inside. Should’ve been a repair job instead, but my dad never fixed it.

So anyway, that one day there was a bird on a tree, a woodpecker I think, but pretty far, the kind of distance the gun isn’t well suited to tackle. So I said “oh well, I’ll just scare it off”, but I still took my best shot, knowing I would miss. Guess what, I didn’t miss. The shot was so good it was an instant kill, the bird didn’t struggle afterward or even slightly move. Just dead. Think I went over my moral limit on that one.

Worse thing still, there was a bird nest my dad looked at from the balcony, and few days later after the incident he asked me, while listening to the hungry baby birds in the nest, if I knew why the parent(s) didn’t come, I said I didn’t.. he probably knew that was me. Eh, what a coward I was (still is?) back then.

Funny how that probably makes me a horrible person, yet having slaughter houses and eating meat is totally cool, with most people anyway. I think if everybody had to kill their own meat, there would be a lot more vegetarians. I’m not one tho, not yet anyway.

: /