Last night, at about 11:30, I took Catherine's dog Cosmo out the front door so she could do her business. Cath went to be earlier after an exhausting first week of vet school. There was a police car with its lights on at the intersection, which seemed weird because he didn't have anyone pulled over.
Cosmo went as far as the driveway and started barking toward the cul de sac for some reason, then came back up on the steps and cowered behind me, as if she knew something bad was going to happen. It was really weird.
I noticed that the cop pulled his shot gun out of the car, and it was at that moment that I noticed a large animal, presumably a deer, was lying on the side of the road. The officer walked over to it and nudged it with his gun. The deer tried to get up, but did little more than push itself up on to the tree lawn. It had clearly been hit, and was in really bad shape.
I kind of knew what was coming, and I didn't want to look. I was so frozen by what was going on though that I couldn't look away. Finally I snapped out of it, and took the dog inside of the house. A few seconds after I closed the door, I heard the loud shot, and the deer was no longer suffering.
I couldn't sleep after that, and to make things worse, Luna was having one of her sick, IBD-induced episodes. My mind trailed to an article I had read earlier in Wired, about bringing people out of comas and when it's appropriate to pull the plug on someone. It struck me as odd that some cultures will keep injured people alive indefinitely, others will pull the plug, and animals we euthanize because it's the right thing to do. It's so strange how we play God in so many ways.