In Florida, we have lizards...lots of lizards everywhere. They crawl up the trees and the fence and seem to stay pretty busy eating ants and avoiding birds. We never really minded the lizards too much until we adopted a cat named Monte. Monte is a black cat we adopted from the SPCA. She was surrendered by her owner who had to move into a nursing home. Monte is a stone cold killer. A lizard killer. We have a dog door that Monte likes to use also to go hunt lizards. At first, she would bring in a lizard and torture it for awhile. This made me mad. So, I would save the lizard. I would sweep it up and take it back outside. Well, this angered the cat, really angered her. She raised the stakes on me big time. She started bringing in the lizards, killing them, and eating them, leaving the heads under my dining table. This act of lizard murder got my kids asking me questions I wasn't prepared to answer: Why does she kill them? Why does she eat them? Does she have to do that? Do other animals do that? Why do things die? Why? Why? Why? It's not like I could say, "Ok, there is this movie called The Lion King we should watch about the circle of life." My boy is 7. He has seen death before. We had a dog get hit by a car, and we had a cat that was attacked by a dog. It is only recently that he is realizing it is final. There is nothing else. I try to answer his questions truthfully, but he doesn't seem to believe me. Maybe it's because I have my own beliefs of what happens in life and death, and I don't want to give him a biased view. Maybe it's because I have guilt. I couldn't save the lizards. I wasn't there to keep them safe, so they died because of me. Maybe it's because I know that I have to let my baby lizard out into the world someday and he will be on his own, and I may not be there to save him from the cat. I will answer his questions the best that I can, as long as I can, since there is no ultimate parent guide on how deal with these things.
