A moment in the life...

[draggonlaady]

It's dusk. I'm crouched in the grass, right hand holding a bloody knife, left hand supporting the chin of the deer who's throat I just slit. Left knee braced against the doe's shoulder, stretching her neck so she'll bleed out faster. All quiet, if not exactly peaceful.

A mini-van, driven by a pleasant looking, middle-aged lady in lawyer's-office-style casual suit pulls up. The lady very politely asks if everything's ok, or if I need some help, and we have a brief chat about living in the country and deer and animals in general. The whole time, I'm still crouched on the doe.

Does anybody else have these totally weird moments where civilized life randomly overlaps with the necessary macabre?

Comments

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

If it took 5 shots with any kind of rifle, he was shooting in the wrong place. Even a 22 is enough at close range. For future reference, tell him NOT to shoot between the eyes. (I'm assuming that's what he did--it's the most common mistake.) That just hits the sinuses. To hit the brain on almost any animal, draw an X from the eyes to the ears and hit in the center of the X.

No, you would have put her in the backseat of your car and brought her home :P (And I can't deny considering that myself.)

Unless you carry a fairly large knife in your car, it's unlikely you'd have really had the option of doing that--I can't imagine trying to saw into a large animal's neck with a little pocket knife :(. I was driving the work truck, so I had my necropsy knives with me, and I carry a hunting knife in my car specifically for that reason.

[sphynx-again.livejournal.com]

Well, he walked as close to her as he could without her starting to freak out, but she was lying down. He was kindof approaching her from the side, I'm not sure really what part exactly he was aiming for. But considering it was nearly dark by this point, making the scope pretty much useless, I think he was just trying to hit her somewhere. After that, she got up and tried to run, and it was a few moments of pandemonium, with him trying to put her down before she got over the top of the hill, then before she succeeded in trampling him. Once she was on the ground, he did walk up to her and shoot her twice in the head, which did needed done.

And the guy admitted he wasn't much of a hunter, didn't like hunting, hated shooting things, and didn't really have much experience doing so. So why did they dispatch him? I suspect he was the only one around a) near enough to get to the site before dark, and b) willing to go out of his way to do something unpleasant and not exactly in his job description.

And yes, had the cats I've had to scoop up survived more than a minute, I probably would have taken them home! Luckily, I've never come upon a deer. Might have trouble loading one into the car by myself. :) And come to think of it, the knife in my glove box is a MINI leatherman. I'd have trouble slitting the throat of a mouse!

[draggonlaady.livejournal.com]

I realize he was trying to help. And I DO appreciate that. I kinda feel like I'm picking on him...I'm not trying to run him down, or make him out to be a bad person.

But euthanasia means GOOD death.
Euthanasia by gunshot means ONE shot.

Shooting something 5 times is torturing it, no matter what the shooter's intentions are. If he didn't have better gun training than that, he shouldn't have been carrying a gun.

It's easy for me to criticize, since I wasn't there... but I don't hunt either, and I have very minimal training with guns (I would have a hell of a time trying to figure out how to load his rifle, for instance), and I know this.

The scope is ever only useful for long-range stuff, so the fact it was getting dark is irrelevant to use of the scope, when he was standing close to the moose anyway. Also... MagLight makes it not nearly as dark. Even if you don't have one in your car (and why don't you? they're much useful!), he should have had.

He should have known that a 22 (which is what he most likely had) wasn't going to go through the shoulder and into the heart very well on an animal that large, and he should never have tried such a shot, especially in an an animal that was laying down and therefore probably curled up with more muscle than normal bunched in front of the heart.

He should have just started from the front, got as close as possible before she started thrashing, waited for her to calm a bit, and shot her in the head to start with.

I will throw in a comment that I don't expect you guys to've known but may come in helpful in the future (like when you're trying to load that hypothetical injured deer into your backseat): if you blindfold damn near any large animal (deer, elk, big horn sheep, etc), they will lay still and let you do about anything. Approach from behind/above a down animal, throw a blanket or a jacket or something over her head, and they will usually just freeze. As long as you keep the blindfold on, you can then examine/manipulate them with minimal fuss or struggling. (I recommend still staying out of the way of the legs, because getting kicked, even by accident, hurts like hell.)

Of course, shooting a blindfolded animal means you probably get a hole in your blanket, but the blankets I carry in my car are for the dogs to sleep on anyway, so I don't really care about that.