The Time My Mother Killed a Toad

It forever impacted me

One of the few things my mother and I had in common was a love for gardening. Her father also had a love for gardening. I have wondered if green thumbs were somehow genetic but then again none of my three siblings ever developed green thumbs. It was just me.

But while both my mother’s thumbs and mine were greenish, there came to be some humongous differences.

As a kid while the family was living in the beautiful Great Southwest Desert I was my mother’s little helper in her large garden. During the course of my childhood I pulled approximately 8.6 billion weeds. All of my fingers turned green. I also earned a few coins moving the grass twice a week in the summers.

When my mother was not looking I would sneak out to the garden to graze, plopping grapes and strawberries and apricots and peaches and anything that was ripe into my mouth like some starving child from some third world country.

I also did a lot of sniffing. My mother had eighteen rose bushes on the property, each a different color. I was constantly sniffing roses as well as the two extremely fragrant butterfly bushes. While my hands were green my nose was a constantly changing rainbow of different colors.

My mother believed that the bottom of a human foot should never, ever, ever, ever touch the ground. Hers had not touched the ground since she was a wee child. We kids had ‘outside shoes’ (flip-flops) that we had to wear when outside in the yard — and we could not wear them indoors so as not to track dirt on the sparkling germ-free floors of the house. The four pairs of flip-flops were on the porch just outside the sliding glass door leading to the yard. We were punished if we were ever caught barefoot outside.

(Concerning bare feet please read my preceding article, Do This Before Meditating.)

Our suburban home was just a couple of blocks from the raw desert. All sorts of wildlife would come from the desert to mosey through the neighborhood. There were always plenty of snakes and tarantulas and desert toads coming into people’s yards.

Once a bobcat wandered into the neighborhood just a few blocks from where we lived. My seventh grade science teacher lived in that part of the neighborhood and when he saw the bobcat in his yard he immediately got his gun and killed it while his wife took pictures. The next week in class he showed off the pictures to all his students. In one picture he was holding the dead bobcat up in the air by the scruff of its neck. He had a huge smile on his face. He was so damn proud of killing that bobcat.

I just wanted to cry.

One hot summer day I was out in the garden helping my mother weed her squash patch. Suddenly I heard a croak and then a shrill gasp coming from my mother. I looked over at where she was working and saw a big brown desert toad.

Desert toads are big; about the size of Dwayne Johnson’s clenched fist. They are also nocturnal. Apparently my mother had awakened it as it slept under the shade of a squash plant. Later, when I was older, I would drive way out into the desert to listen to the incredible symphonies created by the croaking of desert toads. They are fantastic musicians.

My mother looked at me and yelled, “Turn around! Turn around!”

So I turned around and looked the other way as I heard my mother’s shovel come down into the earth. I looked back around to see that my mother had cut the toad in half with her shovel. Toad guts had spewed out. My mother then quickly buried the remains.

In science class I had learned that frogs and toads eat insects. My mother was always complaining about all the bugs in her garden. That toad could have helped her keep the insect population down.

So I asked, “Why did you kill the toad?”

She looked at me and sternly explained, “That toad is a wild animal! Wild animals do not belong in our garden. Why do you think our entire property is fenced? It’s to keep cats and dogs and wild animals and kids out. Why do you think I put nets over all the fruit trees? It’s to keep those damn birds from eating our fruit. Gardening would be so much easier and we would have so much more food from it if only we could find some way to kill all the bugs and birds and wild animals in the world. Then there would no longer be any hunger in the world. The world would be a paradise.”

I stood there with my mouth open not believing what I just heard. My mother was the Adolf Hitler of gardening! Everyone knows the importance of bugs and birds and animals to a healthy environment. How could my mother be so ignorant? I was shocked and began thinking that my mother must have some sort of mental impairment that separated her from other humans. If we killed all the bugs and birds and animals it would be an environmental catastrophe for the planet. How could she not know that? The bounty of the Earth was for all creatures, not just humans. Even as a kid that was so obvious to me.

But as I grew up I came to realize that my mother’s way of thinking was actually quite pervasive in society. It definitely was not just her who thought that way. I learned that her way of thinking matched the thinking of the majority of humans (especially in the Western World) and that my way of thinking matched only a small fringe minority of people.

My mother’s brutal murder of that desert toad helped set me on a path of pacifism, environmental activism, and conscious eating and gardening. It hurts to say it but I am thankful to her for that. She provided me a clear example of what I desperately wanted NOT to be like.

Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved. White Feather Archive