Conceptual Snakeskin

Conceptual Questions from my False Memory:

• Are all young things necessarily innocent?

• Are all lives equal or are some valued more highly than others? What is the value of a life dependant on?
• Is killing to save a life morally acceptable? Is it better to allow things to take their natural course?
  

My story is obviously mostly fictional. It springs from a memory from my childhood where my father killed a young rattlesnake with our household sledgehammer to save me from potential danger. It was an event very important to myself and my parents, but one that went more or less unnoticed by the world at large. A small ripple in a stagnant lake, the world easily recovers from such things. In fact it moves on without thought. This event however continues to be significant to me. Most of my ideas on the subject spring from the death of that rattlesnake.
Living in places where such beasts are common, we are told that the younger ones are the most dangerous – they know the least control and know not what amount of venom incapacitates versus what kills. I often wondered about the truth of this, though I would not have wished to test the idea that deadly afternoon. Perhaps it would have taken fright, but it is also possible that it was thoughtless in the way that human children are thoughtless, less easy to frighten with true danger, yet skittish of things that hold no harm. Are young animals the darling, personified creatures with large baby eyes that are shown us through popular culture in Disney films? The snake itself is never trusted. A man killer, it is never shown with the innocent eyes. We think it naturally to be the seducer, malignant and nefarious. This led me to my first question: are all young things necessarily innocent? It is possible that this snake was all that my quaint imaginings painted it to be, but it is more than likely not.
I also wondered at the right we have to kill what we deem lesser, but harmful. What is it about an animal that makes it lesser than humans? Self-knowledge one might say, but this is not true. In many ways animals know there own minds better than humans do. They are unhindered by shame, pretentiousness, and morals. To be human is to attempt to rise above the base despite internal desires. Is this simply a form of self-denial and deceit? This led me to the following: are all lives equal or are some valued more highly than others? What is the value of a life dependant on? My answer to the first is certainly, in the idea that some lives are more valued than others. I cannot rightly say whether there is truth in the values that we assign specific lives.
This last made me question what right have we to kill without grief when we have no idea on what the worth of a life is judged. As humans we try to rise above the animal instinct, yet when we kill or hurt, we justify our actions with the rationale of survival. Here follows my last set of questions: is killing to save a life morally acceptable? Is it better to allow things to take their natural course?