"groaning creation"

Today at work I happened upon a snake.  Then its head caught my eye.  Huge and bulbous?  But no. It was a snake eating a small bullfrog.  Of course I learned in science class --yea, witnessed a python eating a rat-- how snakes can eat things so much bigger by unhinging their jaws.  Still, this was quite an ambitious stretch!

I showed it to other people.

Later it seemed not to have progressed all that much.  Nearing halfway, perhaps.  We were all grossed out but curious and left it be.  The grossest part was that the frog was alive--being eaten feet first.

Not to go into further detail.  The snake actually gave up on the frog--next time I walked by the snake was gone and the frog was lying there, looking rather normal, but dead.

Suddenly a memory unlocked with photographic clarity, seeing a snake eat a frog when I was four or five. My big brother had a garter snake, I think, and had caught a small frog for it.  Everyone treated it like a science project, or maybe a movie since we didn't get to watch many of those--we crowded around the terrarium in horrified fascination.  I too stared for some time before I'd had enough of the horror.

What I saw in the behavior of the snake and the frog led me to understand a horrific, sinister possibility about conflict:

The bad guy might not be cackling with glee, but in fact completely serious about his evil deed, even inconvenienced greatly by it.
The victim might bear the pain and totally accept the conscious slide toward death.

"It's nature...."

In seventh grade my teacher fed a rat to his boa constrictor.  He had a little clasping tool that held the rat by its tail, and lectured us for a couple minutes while the rat dangled there.  The rat clasped struggled and begged, clasping its hands together, most actively begging it seemed, to be freed.  In the cage, the deal was over quickly--the boa grabbed it and slammed it into the water dish or something brutal but swift.  But at any rate, this particular educational moment was gross, but not of a stomach-churning horror of a creature accepting its sacrifice.

But today, I saw again that slow motion killing of a frog, and it took me back.
Sick.
Sick that one should submit to such an evil.
Sick that I watched it as a little kid. (Just because things happen in nature doesn't mean they should be watched.)
I'm sure the frog is actually paralyzed, but still the appearance of compliance is so sick.

It made it a little bit worse even that the snake had chosen a prey too large to eat, but still killed it: in the process, my imagination accused, of trying to prove the amazing stories of how large of prey snakes can eat.


So then do I judge people who've been victimized as weak or compliant, because they don't "get away" or "say no"?
Shame on me if so.  What business have I.
If I ever see such a thing again, I don't care what "nature" says.  If the frog is still alive, I will fight to free it from that snake that dared to follow its natural course in front of a compassionate set of eyes.