Sciuricide

Tree Moss as a Sciuricide.—A man who lives near Templeton has been telling the Times how he exterminated the squirrels with whose holes his land was honey-combed.

Sir,—My old friend Mr. [William James] Stillman’s captivating account of his experiences with squirrels published in the Spectator of December 19th, appeals strongly to my empathy. When, as a boy, I levelled my gun at every bird, great or small, that would give me a sitting shot, my bloodthirstiness revolted from the massacre of a squirrel; and only once in my very early days did I commit sciuricide, for which abominable wickedness my conscience long reproached me as keenly as if I had been guilty of an unprovoked murder. Very many years afterwards I became possessed of a beautiful specimen of the American grey squirrel, upon which I lavished all the affection which might propitiate the manes of the slaughtered innocent of my boyhood.

Any human being who has been so fortunate as to have enlisted the love, and awakened the intellect of these little quadrupeds, will henceforward, like Sir Edmund [Monson], regard sciuricide as only some grades lower in the scale of wickedness than homicide, but no less to be abhorred. / Your careless readers will question the soundness of my mental state when I say that I learned of my squirrels lessons of love to all living creatures, such as a varied and dramatic experience of humanity had never taught me, and which make it impossible for me even now, though I am an old man, to tell of their lovely lives with dry eyes (for they are both dead);

Within anyone’s memory, we had but one vehicular sciuricide, a gentleman squirrel, on an errand of love. He paid for his disregard of safety rules with his life—as any jaywalker might.

Humans hunt squirrels during the fall. “Sciuricide,” death by vehicles, happens as squirrels cross highways. At least one squirrel death has been reported from a porcupine quill in the chest cavity. Ouch!

One winter morning a couple of years ago, biking the usual route through my neighborhood east of downtown Atlanta to my preferred coffee shop in Inman Park, I happened upon a small tragedy. There in the road, beneath the gloomy Victorian façades, bare oaks, and sagging telephone lines, two squirrels lay dead, side by side—an apparent hit and run. Double sciuricide.