My boss was telling us the other day about his chipmunk problem. Here's a guy who claims to have been 'this close' to winning a Nobel prize. And 'this close' to attending a Nobel prize awards ceremony. But really, he's not so bad.
Or is he? He explained to us the destructive nature of chipmunks, and he crafted stories of rock walls crumbling, house foundations destroyed, and lots of little chipmunk-holes torn through back yards. So I get it... they're pests. And there exist several typical options for dealing with them. Poison, cat, dog, trap and release, etc.
I felt a moment of humane solidarity when he explained that he'd bought a bunch of rodent traps - the harmless kind. I thought, aww, he lets them go, just like in 'Curse of the Were-Rabbit'. Maybe there's a chipmunk sanctuary nearby where they can live in peace.
But he continued. When he catches a chipmunk (and he gets between 15 and 30 in a weekend), he approaches the trap, aims his pellet gun, and shoots it in the head. He explained that he occasionally misses (?!), and also occasionally, one will look directly at the gun and sniff the barrel with its little chipmunk nose before he obliterates it. Then, it's off to the carcass pile with the other unfortunate vermin. His young children are aware that he does this... I'm just waiting for the day one of them catches him at it. I wanted to puke up my inexpensive chimichanga.
***
Also, before I came to Madison, I had never heard of a cow magnet before. I thought, "Perhaps something like a chick magnet. The bull has some sort of contraption that encourages cows to come and mate with it." Nope. A cow magnet is a magnet that is fed into the cow's digestive system and attracts anything metal that the cow has inadvertently eaten. Then you simply pull out the magnet, and voila! Happy cow. Brilliant.
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3 comments:
seirig
i don't know if you'll read a comment on such an old post, but this reminds me of back in the house i grew up in in mid-michigan when there was a chipmunk living in the woodpile in the garage. it had chewed off a corner of the garage door so it could come and go, and so my dad set a live trap for it and caught it promptly. now, i knew that previously he had bb-gunned larger, ground-hog-esque live trap victims, but figured it'd be rather hard to keep a freaked out chipmunk still enough to shoot. that's when i learned he planned on sticking the whole trap in a bucket of water to drown it. i was horrified. it may only have been a chipmunk, but i spread newspapers down in the back of my car, took the chipmunk in trap, and drove it out about half an hour to the nature center to release it.
Yes. You would fit in well with my family. That sounds perfectly normal to me :)
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