Lennie looked sadly up at him. “They was so little,” he said apologetically. “I’d pet ’em, and pretty soon they bit my fingers and I pinched their heads a little and then they was dead – because they was so little. I wish’t we’d get the rabbits pretty soon, George. They ain’t so little.”
– John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men, Chapter 1. Lennie explains to George about the killing of the mice. Many creatures do not survive Lennie’s grasp. This foreshadows what will eventually happen to Curley’s wife.