Tragedy at the Wren's Nest

Before, I kept you posted on the baby wrens in the hanging basket.  Yesterday morning before daylight I planned to take a picture of them in their nest, but I was surprised to see it empty, since I knew they were too young to fledge.

At about the same time I notice something on the window sill near the basket.  It was a king snake.  There were three bulges in its body, which were the baby birds.

I captured the snake and put it in a half-gallon jar to study it.  Indeed, it was a king snake, about two feet long.  These are some photos I took:

I was very angry and upset that the snake had eaten the babies that I had grown close to, but when I cooled down, I realized that the king snake was just doing what its nature dictated.

This set me to thinking. We tend to anthropomorphize - assign human characteristics to animals - because we live in a society where some things are wrong and need addressing, but to the snake it was a bonanza find - three helpless babies that would satiate it for a month or more.

We humans do things that are far worse than a snake following its nature.   We take infant calves from their mothers, put them in a dark stall with no room to move about because their muscles would develop and their meat wouldn't be tender, force them to stand or lie in their excrement and feed them nothing but cow's milk, which results in scours for their entire miserable lives.

When they are mercifully killed and sent to the supermarket, where they are cut into steaks, wrapped in innocuous plastic and labeled "veal," we are distanced from its plight. We hire others to do the business of processing.  Don't get me wrong - I eat meat, but I don't eat veal because of the inhumane manner in which it is forced to spend it's short life.

My first thought was to kill the snake, thereby avenging the baby birds, but I knew that would be wrong.  No animal is "mean" by our definition, so I carried it over to some woods a good distance from my house and I let it go.  Had it been a copperhead or a rattlesnake, I'm not what I would do.