Thou Shalt Not Eat

Last evening, we allowed the After Therapy mascot outdoors to pee while we had a cigarette. The Yorkie scampered off to his normal peeing area and we glanced in the opposite direction - part out of an over-wrought sense of modesty, but mostly to watch The Cop drive by.

In that blink of an eye, we turned back to see the dog scampering up the walk. Speaking in baby-talk to our 56 year-old Yorkie ("Good boooooy! You're such a good booooy! You wanna treeeeeat? Awwwwww!), we realized we had inadvertently bonded with a possum. Murphy jumped onto the steps 10 feet before the possum did and we both hid in the house and wondered if this was a reason to call 911. He was for it. I was ambivalent.

I spent the next hour on Vicodin (for a headache, not the possum...that's my story) staring out the front door for signs of possum infestation. I slept with dreams of being attacked by razor-toothed creatures hanging upside down from my ceiling fan. When I would awake to visit the john, I would turn on the all the lights and confirm there was no possum perched on my potty before entering the room. I made a mental note to research this in the morning and determine whether to move the Official Threat Level from green to orange.

I have been in rural America for three years now and remain varmint-averse. I own a riding lawn-mower so as not to put myself at easy-strike level of the slithering varieties on my modest expanse of property. It's also fun to chase them down and watch them fly out the mower's blow hole in pieces. I feel I've satisfied some biblical mandate to kill or be killed where snakes are concerned. Garter, rattler, copperhead or cobra....they're all the same to me. If it slithers, it dies. This year's score: John Deere 2, Varmints 0. If you're a PETA board member, save your paper. We are not changing the After Therapy policy where snakes are concerned.

As a teen in Suburbia, I was fulfilling my assigned chore of mowing the lawn when a snake slithered out from under the push-mower and crawled between my feet. I left the mower in place and returned to the kitchen table and had a sandwich, since Vicodin was not yet in the household formulary. Some minutes later, mother asked if the yard was finished. I replied that it was not.

She looked out the back door and asked if the mower was still running, wasting 70-cent per gallon gasoline. I answered that it was.

She asked if I was inclined to go out and finish the job. I was not. Would I be interested, at a minimum, in turning off the mower until such time as I was ready to finish the job? I was not.

Bewildered, she resorted to a tried-and-true Redneck Mom Parenting Method: Threaten to finish it yourself and shame your son by having mother finish his chores. This method has absolutely no effect on Stone Cold Cowards. I happily watched her finish mowing, knowing that I had escaped imminent death and could quite possibly be watching the start of my Trust Fund Years. She reported on the experience afterward: Sears Lawn Mower 1, Varmints 0. This was the beginning of my fixation on killing lethal critters with a lawn mower. I prefer to do it seated at a height from which I can safely view the execution, though.

This morning, we Googled and Googled hoping to find out whether the possum would have eaten our 14-pound Yorkie (he's big-boned, the vet confirmed it just yesterday). While we discovered that possums are omnivores (creatures who will eat anything; see "Star Jones"), we were riveted and repulsed at the scores of recipes for things you hit with the car.

Moose is greasy, cat tastes like chicken, possum smells bad unless you cage it and feed it corn for a week before you eat it, rabbits are effective processors of protein and thus a great munch, and road-kill in general is pretty good if, when you touch it (!) it's still warm on the side of the road. That last instruction caused us confusion, since we live in a climate where it stays at least 80-degrees from May until September. Never mind the notion of pulling the car over to place our hands on a possibly-dead animal.

For the benefit of all Americans, who live in a country where there is more than enough food, we thought it important to suggest Thou Shalt Not Eat Food With regnaR droF Imprinted On Its Side. If German Shepherd tastes like chicken...just eat chicken, for Chrissakes. If you would buy it in a pet store or run from it in the wild, don't bring it to the table in a berry sauce.

The After Therapy kitchen has explicit limits: Cow, Pig, and Chicken. Period. If we ever open the freezer and see feet or eyeballs, someone is moving out. (And closing the freezer door for us.) We appreciate that starving peoples in the jungles of various continents rely on such non-standard fare to survive and we are nothing if not pro-survival. However, for as long as there is a grocery store within a day's drive, we will not rob the starving peoples of the world of their end of the food chain.

Have your animal spayed or neutered. Unless it has no legs. Then run over it with the mower.