Lennie does not kill little animals accidentally. He tells George that he usually kills them because they struggle to get away and sometimes bite him. It should be noted that rabbits are raised for no other purpose than to kill them and eat them. (They taste a lot like chicken.) Lennie is looking forward to tending rabbits for two reasons. One is that he will have the pleasure of petting soft little animals. The other reason is that, since he is the one who tends the rabbits, he will be the one who kills them when they are fat enough to eat. In other words, he gets pleasure from petting little animals, and he also gets pleasure from killing them. This sensual pleasure he derives from petting and killing animals is symptomatic of an incipient sexual interest in human females which Lennie does not understand and which George does not suspect until he sees the dead body of Curley's young wife in the barn. George
...was down on his knees beside her. He put his hand over her heart. And finally, when he stood up, slowly and stiffly, his face was as hard and tight as wood, and his eyes were hard.
George is beginning to detest Lennie. George also feels guilty of the girl's death because he brought Lennie to this ranch, because he protected him from the lynch mob in Weed, and because he "should have knew" that Lennie was becoming a menace to society, a potential serial killer of young girls. Lennie can't be blamed for being what he is, but that doesn't change what he has become.
"I should of knew," George said hopelessly. "I guess maybe way back in my head I did."
That is the most significant passage in the book. George "should have knew" that Lennie had not told him the truth about the incident with the girl in Weed. Lennie was not interested in feeling the girl's soft dress, but he was sexually attracted to the girl herself. And that girl in Weed might have been very young. When she got the idea that he was trying to rape her, she wasn't far from the truth--although Lennie himself probably didn't understand his own urges. George assumes that something similar happened with Curley's wife in the barn--and he wasn't far from the truth there either. Lennie didn't know what he was doing. If Curley's wife hadn't started struggling and screaming, Lennie probably would have raped her, and in the process he might have killed her, accidentally on purpose. Lennie is becoming a monster because of his low intelligence and enormous physical strength and emerging sex drive.
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