At the top of the food chain, can’t deal with it
Okay, this is just hilarious:
THE homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life.
Given the size of the property — a 12-acre former horse farm — fencing was out of the question. He bought a Havahart live animal trap but did not catch a thing. And he worried that releasing woodchucks down the road would only be dumping the problem on a neighbor. So he moved on to that tried-and-true landlord’s tactic: harassment. He attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his old pickup truck and stuffed it into a burrow — not to kill the woodchucks, just to encourage them to move on. That didn’t work, either.
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Jeez; anthropomorphize much, cupcake?
Verily, it takes a city boy to be this ludicrously clueless about the natural order of things. And this one, rather than dreamily over-romanticizing a back-to-nature lifestyle whose harsher realities he is in no way prepared to cope with or even accept, should’ve stayed in the asphalt jungle — where metrosexual cringing, cowering, and crying isn’t the existential weakness it is elsewhere.
But then, we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of pointing and laughing at the gormless dweeb.
(Via see-dub, who has a peck of fun at the dweebie’s expense himself)
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