Interesting dinner hour. It began with me, holding a shovel in my backyard, considering whether I should bash an injured opossum (that was “playing possum”), and ended with my son and I watching an attractive young LEO, on her last shift in the public sector, with a police captain’s daughter in tow as a ride-along, discharging four rounds of .40 S&W into the opossum at less than three feet.
The whole process reminded me of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” on a much smaller scale. In the end, I was glad I did not have to kill it in front of my wife, but I kept on thinking about those idiots in Brookline hiding from turkeys.
What is Orwellian or perhaps Kafkaesque about this is that my wife wanted to leave it alone to see if it was just “playing possum.” (We did leave it alone for a while to see if it would recover and leave.) While I am not a hunter, I come from a family of hunters who would never leave an injured animal. By the time we tried to call “animal control” to ask their advice, we could only get the police, who said that they would send someone to “put it in a barrel, take it down to the station, and shoot it.” I said “OK” to that. So, by the time the LEO arrived with her captain’s daughter, the decision had already been made to kill it, and the officer did not really have a different mindset. The problem was now the procedure. She had a several minutes long conversation with someone higher up her food chain on what to do. We watched it breathe.
The officer was very nervous, and told me that she was told to shoot it on site, and I would have to dispose of it. She also said that she had never been involved in a “hazardous situation” before. By drawing her weapon, she was automatically in a “hazardous situation” under department policy. (I confess that trash disposal is tomorrow, and that was in the back of my mind the whole time; I’ve had dead stuff that I picked up in my yard before, and the smell after a week ain’t perfume.)
Afterwards she took pictures and told the ride-along she’d send her a copy.
The first two shots caused it to spasm, it stretched out it left leg almost straight in the air. The third caused the same reaction, and it bent backwards on its spine. With the fourth, it was still.
While my wife held the garbage bag, I shoveled it in, wished the LEO a good future in the business world, and locked the gate. When I went into the house, my wife said, ‘I think we should have left it alone overnight. Sometimes they just freak out and will lie playing dead for hours’ I said, ‘I’ve seen them get up just a few minutes after a threat disappeared,’ and, ‘I’m just glad that I was not the one who had to do it.’
I wonder if that’s true.
The whole process reminded me of George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” on a much smaller scale. In the end, I was glad I did not have to kill it in front of my wife, but I kept on thinking about those idiots in Brookline hiding from turkeys.
What is Orwellian or perhaps Kafkaesque about this is that my wife wanted to leave it alone to see if it was just “playing possum.” (We did leave it alone for a while to see if it would recover and leave.) While I am not a hunter, I come from a family of hunters who would never leave an injured animal. By the time we tried to call “animal control” to ask their advice, we could only get the police, who said that they would send someone to “put it in a barrel, take it down to the station, and shoot it.” I said “OK” to that. So, by the time the LEO arrived with her captain’s daughter, the decision had already been made to kill it, and the officer did not really have a different mindset. The problem was now the procedure. She had a several minutes long conversation with someone higher up her food chain on what to do. We watched it breathe.
The officer was very nervous, and told me that she was told to shoot it on site, and I would have to dispose of it. She also said that she had never been involved in a “hazardous situation” before. By drawing her weapon, she was automatically in a “hazardous situation” under department policy. (I confess that trash disposal is tomorrow, and that was in the back of my mind the whole time; I’ve had dead stuff that I picked up in my yard before, and the smell after a week ain’t perfume.)
Afterwards she took pictures and told the ride-along she’d send her a copy.
The first two shots caused it to spasm, it stretched out it left leg almost straight in the air. The third caused the same reaction, and it bent backwards on its spine. With the fourth, it was still.
While my wife held the garbage bag, I shoveled it in, wished the LEO a good future in the business world, and locked the gate. When I went into the house, my wife said, ‘I think we should have left it alone overnight. Sometimes they just freak out and will lie playing dead for hours’ I said, ‘I’ve seen them get up just a few minutes after a threat disappeared,’ and, ‘I’m just glad that I was not the one who had to do it.’
I wonder if that’s true.
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