Sometimes – like when it kills a baby rabbit – it is hard for me to love a cat, even Flo, our tough little barn cat. This morning, Maria came to tell me that there was a baby rabbit in Flo’s mouth right by the back door, she understood that cats kill baby rabbits and  eat them but she couldn’t bear to hear the rabbit squeal, she could handle it if it was dead, but I could see this was hard for her.

I threw my bathrobe on and went outside. The rabbit died just as I reached over to take it from Flo, I could feel the heart stop in my hands, the rabbit was still very warm. I took it away and put it over the fence and into a remote part of the pasture, I don’t believe in burying animals when they can feed wild creatures and birds.

It is hard for me to see the cats hunt and kill baby rabbits. There is a part of most cats I know that is both murderous and cruel. Flo was not just trying to eat the rabbit, she was playing with it, and it wasn’t first this summer, either.

There is a great dichotomy about cats, they can be loving or positively lethal, and both are nature behaviors. The mystical part of cats is that they have never been fully domesticated, a wild part of them lives on, and they know how to hunt and to kill.

I don’t put this photo up to shock, but because my farms is a great teacher, there is life here and death here, almost every day. I am often reminded that death is a part of life, as night is a part of day, they go hand in hand. The farm has helped me to understand death in a new way, I do not shy from it any longer.

I am  reminded that in the grand scheme of things, death is the universal reality, the one thing we all share, the one place we we shall all go. I don’t with to hide from it, or only put up photos of cute and loving donkeys and dogs. I share my life, and death is a regular, almost daily, part of it.

This has also helped me in my hospice and therapy work. Every few weeks, someone I care about and have come to know in a special way declines and dies. Names go on and off the list of people who wish to receive messages. People I see on Wednesday are not there on Thursday, and I don’t even have to ask what happened, I know. When they leave, they rarely return.

Maria said there was a time when she would have grabbed that rabbit and tried to save it. Me too. But not any longer. We just wanted it to die quickly, and Flo took care of that.

But I couldn’t bear to keep it on my porch.

A couple of minutes after I wrote this, the Presumption Patrol struck on Facebook: “And yet,” wrote Ann, “I suspect that you would praise the cat for catching a Rodent!”

This was a comment that threw me for a moment.

I struggled imagining myself praising a cat for killing a mouse.

I generally don’t praise the cats for the killing choices they make, and they have never asked me for my opinion about it, nor do they seem to care.

It is true that the sight of a dead or suffering baby rabbit gets to me more than a mouse – I eagerly set mousetraps all the time when their leavings are found in the kitchen near our food, and celebrate their demise  – but the barn cats are free to hunt whatever creatures it is in their nature to choose.

I don’t get involved.

It is hard to love a cat when they kill a baby rabbit. But I do, they are just being true to their nature as I try to be true to mine.