The Extinction Club (20 page)

Baz was convicted of unlawful possession of dead wildlife, trafficking dead wildlife, hunting wildlife during the closed
season, unlawful export of endangered species & cruelty to animals.

Here’s the transcript, at least the tail end of it (J is Judge Johanne Lebrun and B is Alcide Bazinet):

J: And do you have any children, Mr. Bazinet?

B: I have a teenage daughter, born out of wedlock. Which is why I was forced to leave the church. Quite rightly. “God wants you to be holy, so you should keep clear of all sexual sin.” Thessalonians IV, 3-4. Which is why I wear this purity ring, and why I urge sexual abstinence among young people.

J: Does your daughter share your views on animals? Have you raised her that way?

B: I do not see the relevance of these questions, your Honour. But I’ll answer them. I have taught her that we have dominion over the animals. That it is written in the Bible, Genesis I, 24-26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

J: Does the Bible say we are allowed to let them suffer? Is there not a biblical law, in fact, that says, “It is forbidden to cause any suffering to any living creature”?

B: Where does it say that?

J: In the Talmud.

B: The Talmud? That’s not the Bible. Are you Jewish? The Bible says that we may lawfully use them for our needs, even if that causes pain. God commanded animals to be sacrificed. Presumably, that hurts.

J: Do you not think, Mr. Bazinet, that we have evolved from those distant times? Modern environmentalism and the animal rights movement —

B: Animals don’t have rights. Because they don’t have reason —

J: I will ask you once again, Mr. Bazinet, not to interrupt. Modern environmentalism and the animal rights movement propose that we open our hearts to our fellow creatures. That we have sympathy for them, that we attempt to share their being, feel their being. Whether they have so-called “reason” or not. We don’t know what they’re feeling. All they have is life — and people like you, Mr. Bazinet, have no qualms about taking that away.

B: Animals feel hungry and they feel ruttish. And when they eat and when they mate, they feel pleasure. But that’s not the same as being human, is it, your Honour?

J: I’ve not finished. Most of us are able to imagine ourselves as someone else, whether animal or human. Able to imagine ourselves on the receiving end, as a victim, but there are some who clearly cannot. In extreme cases, we call these people psychopaths. Would you say, Mr. Bazinet, that you have a sympathetic imagination?

B: The animal rights movement, deep ecology, eco-feminism, the worship of Gaia, Mother Earth, the Endangered Species Act —
all of these have the stench of pagan nature-worship. Or Far Eastern mysticism. They are alien to our Christian moral outlook. To our Western traditions. Wild creatures are placed there by the Almighty for man to study, follow, hunt, kill, cook and eat. The eco-loonies want to take man from the pinnacle of creation and make him a simple cog in the system. This is not what the Almighty intended.

J: And what did the Almighty intend?

B: Death and killing are part of life, a part of the universe that the Lord created. It’s a natural thing, a natural dynamic. We kill animals for food, food that I’m guessing you yourself eat, we kill them by the millions every day in slaughterhouses. And some animals kill — it’s what they do, part of what defines them. And humans? We’re animals too, so why shouldn’t some of us kill? Why shouldn’t that be part of what we do, what defines us? There’s something called the hunter’s high, an irresistible feeling of pleasure. What some hunters call being “stoked.” Which God gave to us as a gift. And to animals too. Don’t you think many of them, like lions and bears, want to kill us? The big eat the small. Some animals, in fact — like rabbits or antelope — live their entire lives in a state of fear.

J. Animals are not cruel. They don’t torture beings for pleasure, for the hell of it.

B. A cat …

J. Which brings us back to my earlier point about compassion, about a sympathetic imagination. The last charge against you pertains to the notion of cruelty. Wanton cruelty toward
animals, inflicting unnecessary pain. Upon our fellow creatures — God’s creatures, to use terminology you seem comfortable with.

B: A cat has to kill and torture a mouse. That’s his nature. A man has to kill and torture animals. That’s his. You’re an educated woman, your Honour, so allow me to quote Nietzsche, who said that life is essentially “appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own force … and exploitation.”

J: Might is right, and hunters with guns can do what they please to those without guns?

B: Yes. The weak are meat the strong eat. Listen, the government itself says that weaker animals in the wild will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without hunters to control their population.

J: But it’s the bigger, stronger animals they’re killing and maiming — the very opposite of natural selection.

B: I have no time for Darwin. I prefer Sartre, who said that “when one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.”

Bazinet smiled after the judge sentenced him. He said everything he did was legal in the court of God. And in the courts of many other countries.

“When you are released from prison,” said the judge, “I suggest you go and live in one of them.”

As Bazinet was led out of the courtroom he looked like … I don’t know what. His face looked like it was made of rubber & his hair of plastic. Everybody knows it’s not his real hair. It’s a wig made of muskox and baboon hair mixed with synthetic fibres. At least that’s what he tells everybody.

On his way by us, in clunking boots with a heel that got him up to five-ten, Baz turned to me & Grand-maman. “You caused me to lose face,” he said, calm as can be, his smoky grey eyes not looking at either of us but somewhere just above us. “No Bazinet loses face. No Bazinet goes to jail. No Bazinet forgets.” I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I flipped him off.

“You are dead meat,” he told me from the doorway, still not raising his voice. “You will be cut open like a fish.” His threats always seemed to involve animals. “Bled like a deer.”

XIII

These were more than threats, as it turned out, and my grandmother was included in them. But no one, including the police, would believe me. So now, once and for all, I’m going to set the record straight, because so many lies have been told about her. That she was a witch, a demon, the anti-Christ, etc.

After my mother died, Grand-maman came up here to get me, to take care of me. She was working at a church in Montreal, but she decided not to go back. She got herself transferred up here, where there was a position open at the Église Ste-Davnet. It had been open for years, not just because there was practically no congregation left, but because there was no salary for the job, just room & board.

Gran had lost her faith by that time & was much more interested in her first love, mathematics. She believed in measurement, not God. From time to time, every third Sunday or so, she would give sermons at the church about the misery that religion has caused in the world. Not that anyone understood what she was talking about — there were only six members in the congregation by that time, one over seventy, four over eighty, one over ninety & none sane enough to follow what she was saying. Except maybe Mr. Llewellyn.

What she was saying basically is that religion & the afterlife & all that is childish nonsense that we should have outgrown ages
ago. That people have been afraid of death from time immemorial, afraid of nothingness, so they invented God & religion.

Here’s a poem (or maybe part of a play) that she gave me to read when I asked about heaven and hell. It’s by Seneca, circa 55 AD, translated by the Earl of Rochester (who was not only a poet but Ranger of Woodstock Forest):

After death nothing is, and nothing, death:

The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.

Let the ambitious zealot lay aside

His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;

Let slavish souls lay by their fear,

Nor be concerned which way nor where

After this life we shall be hurled.

Dead, we become the lumber of the world,

And to that mass of matter shall be swept

Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.

Devouring time swallows us whole;

Impartial death confounds body and soul.

For Hell and the foul fiend that rules

God’s everlasting fiery jails

(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),

With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,

Are senseless stories, idle tales,

Dreams, whimseys, and no more.

The archdeacon ended up firing my grandmother, defrocking her, and putting the church up for sale.

Gran did not kill herself, as most people think. “No animal,” she once told me, “commits suicide, or kills others while committing suicide. And I won’t either.” (She was wrong about animals committing suicide, but that’s another story, one I’ve already told.) It’s true that Gran was dying of cancer, but it’s not true that she ended her life because of that. She was murdered.

It happened on the day before Hallowe’en, just before dinner. When I came back from town on my bike there was an ambulance out front, its spinning light making bonfires in the trees. The driver told me they found my grandmother in a chair in her office upstairs. With a plastic bag over her head. This bag is called an “Exit Bag” or sometimes an “Aussie Bag.” It has a Velcro collar that fits snug around the neck & a hose that carries helium from a tank to displace the air inside. It causes a person to die from lack of oxygen. It’s a method approved by the Right to Die Network of Canada, which my grandmother belonged to. Which is why they ruled it a suicide. But you need someone to help you use the bag & as I say, I wasn’t there. So who “helped” her? The person who made the nine-eleven in a little girl’s voice and said it was me. Play the tape, I said, and you’ll see it wasn’t me but they said there is no tape.

The Exit Bag was forced on her. And I know who did it. A man with big army boots (thank you, Mr. Llewellyn) and a gut hanging over his underpants like a bag of wet cement. Who I’m going to exterminate.

   XIV   

C
éleste did not make a sound as I removed, with nail scissors and tweezers, her dental floss stitches. An act of bravery? No, I had given her a power-dose of pethidine. It worked so well that she asked if I could get her a year’s supply. I looked for signs of infection around the two knife wounds but couldn’t find any: no pus, no redness, no swelling, no heat. If lucky, I might just avoid a malpractice suit.

“What do I owe you, doc?” she said, comfortably asprawl on the bed.

The purplish-blue lines on her throat were fainter and the ring of red sores on her wrists and ankles—rope burns—were almost gone. But there were still marks beneath her eyes like bruises under the skin of an apple.