Would you shoot a squirrel with a BB gun?

I had the opportunity recently to shoot a squirrel with a BB gun, and I couldn't do it. But wait. Let me back up. I did shoot a squirrel with a BB gun, which is why I don't think I will again.

We've had squirrels all over our backyard deck this summer, ransacking the bird feeder, running across the roof at all hours, maybe -- according to our friends and neighbors -- eating away at the electrical cords in our attic. They started, a year or so ago, as a squirrel couple, but now they are, by count, a squirrel family. They run rampant over our house and our trees. I saw one just yesterday sitting on its haunches in a tree in our front yard, gnawing off whole branches to get to some kind of nut I didn't even know we were growing.

Tree rats, a friend calls them. Pests. Get rid of them.

But how?

We called a "pest removal" company, but they wanted $70 per squirrel removed -- we have at least six or seven -- and no guarantee that a neighbor's cat won't wander into the trap, which means more money to remove it.

So I bought a BB gun.

You may or may not know what that is. A BB is a very small metal ball, about the size of the smallest pearl you would string onto a bracelet or necklace. And BB guns come in all sizes and strengths. I went to my neighborhood Super Walmart and asked for the weakest BB gun. I didn't want to kill a squirrel, just scare it away.

The one I bought was the cheapest -- $16.99 -- and was spring-loaded, which meant I had to cock it after every shot, which isn't as easy as it sounds. (The clerk, by the way, told me that his dad had bought one for the exact same purpose but had made the mistake of shooting the poor squirrel in the head, which killed it, which meant that he had to decide what to do with the carcass, which, in that case, meant throwing it into the dumpster with the trash. If you hit the squirrel in the body, the clerk assured me, it would sting but shouldn't penetrate the flesh.)

At home, I loaded the BB gun pistol with the BBs, cocked it, and waited for a squirrel to appear.
It was late afternoon when one did. On the backyard deck, eating birdseed that had dropped from the bird feeder. I slipped the door open and took aim. The squirrel was no more than six feet from me. I couldn't miss. I fired. He -- or she -- jerked and immediately left the deck, sprinting for the trees not far away.

I didn't experience the thrill of the kill, so to speak. At best, I'd discouraged this one squirrel from feeding on dropped seeds on our deck. But did he/she connect this stinging sensation in the hindquarters with eating those seeds? Would that one random -- and probably painful -- sensation keep him or her from coming on the deck again, looking for something to eat? Probably not. The next morning, a squirrel was back, swinging from the bird-feeder.

So when I was sitting on the front porch the next day, reading the newspaper, and saw a squirrel sitting in a tree not ten feet from me, on its haunches on a limb, eating a nut, I didn't go for the BB gun.

Friends might say it was because I was in Viet Nam and called artillery shells on possibly innocent villages, maybe killing lots of women and children, but I think it's because something in me doesn't want to kill ANYTHING. I don't stomp spiders. I ride my bike around bugs on the walk. I only kill wasps and bees when my wife demands it; she's allergic to their stings. (And I secretly apologize for killing them.) Oh, and mosquitos, especially after I got what I think was West Nile virus a couple of years ago. Flies I pretty much leave alone; they'll be dead in a few days anyway.

More than once I've been sitting on the porch, reading the newspaper, when a certain tiny insect alights on the page -- so tiny that it would take a microscope to discern its features -- and I watch it walk across the vast expanse of white and black and don't disturb its path. Once I blew on one and was amazed to find that it didn't go away. I blew again. Again, it stayed rooted to the page. How do you get such footing? Rock-climbers would love to know!

No, I can't shoot squirrels. Except for the exceptions I've mentioned, I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to killing other creatures.

I guess I'm just amazed that life exists on such levels down from ours that I'm hesitant to kill ANY of them. Those tiny, almost microscopic creatures still haunt me. I mean, how is it possible to be alive and moving across the page and be about the size of that "o" I just typed? Or the size of that ' I just typed? Got that? The ' I just typed. That was the size of the bug that crawled across my newspaper. What's that all about?

I'm just not sure who or what is important. Are you?