Thankfully, this isn't overt, active animal cruelty (at least, not on the part of any humans), but it does involve harm to wild animals, and callousness on Empty Ellie's part.

When I was around 11, a cat adopted us. She showed up one night, in the middle of winter, clearly an adult cat, not fixed, friendly as hell. Probably a cat that had dropped off by some asshole who didn't want her anymore.

That cat and I developed an incredibly deep bond, and I loved her madly. Even though she was kind of a psycho hunter cat (she was sweet as can be to me, but man did she love to hunt).

Our first summer together, we learned that one of her favorite past times was to find a baby animal, play with it awhile, and in the course of playing with it, chew off a leg...or two...or three...or all of them...and then eventually deposit it on our front porch alive and then go off on her merry way to other cat business.

Opening your front door to find a baby bunny with 3 legs chewed off is...not a great experience. Especially when Empty Ellie is involved.

The first thing that Empty Ellie did the first time this happened was to run back into the house and climb on top of the kitchen table. Why the fuck she did this (and she did it when the cat also brought obviously dead animals to the door, and sometimes snuck inside with them) is beyond me. Also, it's a freaking bunny rabbit. It's not a possum, it's not a snake, it's not a racoon. It's a bunny. It's obviously a bunny, and it's never going to eat you.

Anyways, after I coaxed Empty Ellie down from the table and we went back out there, and saw that this poor baby bunny was missing more than one leg, and was not going to live, Empty Ellie's brilliant idea was this: "We'll get a shovel, and put it under the oak tree, and God will take it to heaven from there".

Now, I'm 12 years old now (had a birthday in the spring), and while I still believe in the Christian God at the time, I know that God isn't going to nip down from heaven to help this bunny. This bunny is going to lay there in pain, and dying, because Empty Ellie doesn't have the ovaries to kill it herself.

So what do I learn to do at 12? (spoiler alert: I'd already learned not to rely on Empty Ellie for anything, so it's not that) I learn to kill baby animals. Because that's better than leaving them to suffer. I figure out (through grisly trial and error) exactly how hard to hit them in the head with a piece of wolmanized scrap wood so that they die right away, and that their skulls don't totally crack and leak out their brains. Because that was also upsetting, morso than just killing them, actually.

If you're wondering where my dad was during this time, he was at work. He had a summer job driving trucks for a local company, and was gone most days until around 8-9 pm. So he wasn't there to help, and I didn't really want to wait hours for him to come home and take care of the poor animals.

For the record, my nut job cat didn't do this every day. Most of the time, she did regular cat murdering, but occasionally, she did this insanity. Probably somewhere between once a week and once a month.

Also, part of what made the situation weird for me in hindsight is that Empty Ellie grew up very poor, and her family kept chickens and geese. According to her, she killed many a chicken and plucked it. So she was either lying or maybe birds were different to her? I dunno. Doesn't really matter, it was still a shitty way for her to handle the whole thing.