In a heartbeat.
After clicking on your first link and I think I actually started panicking, and I couldn’t dare to click the others. I’ve never had a phobia, but if I did it would be opossums.
I thought myself a friend to animals, but I don’t feel at all sorry for one less opossum in the world.
I’m not going to jump all over the OP, I know they can be nuisance animals - just don’t use the “OMG Rabies!!” excuse. However I would rather he used other methods to chase it off this time and saved the lethal solution for the next visit if there was one. After all he said this was the first time he saw it and he did invite it and every other animal onto his porch by leaving food out.
Totally concur. Those pics will be in my nightmares tonight.
I wonder about this, too.
This exact scenario occurred to me several years ago when I lived in a townhouse complex. I had lived there for 22 years and never saw hardly any wildlife other than sparrows or grackles. Then a possum appeared. My immediate neighbor and I enjoyed seeing it snooping around. In fact, it was snooping around a cat food bowl- just like the OP’s possum. It was novel and didn’t appear to be causing any trouble and soon, within a couple of weeks, it was gone. We assumed it had just moved on.
Then another neighbor told us he caught it and broke its neck with a broomstick. He said he laid the broomstick across its neck and yanked the animal up by its tail. Now, how ferocious was that animal?
My question was “Why?”
Like that neighbor and this poster, I guess I just don’t understand the idea that the one time a stray wildlife animal appears, your first instinct is to kill it.
The OP says it’s an unusual animal to his area and he’s never seen one before, so surely they aren’t causing much trouble there.
To clarify once again, the only reason I took out the possum was due to the possibility of Equine Protozoal Myoencephalitis transmission, if there were no horses involved, I’d just as soon shooed it off the porch instead
Well at least you apologized before unnecessarily shooting it in the head and starting a thread about it, that helps a lot.
Ugly, viscous-looking creatures they are. I hate possums. We had one in college that lived in our laundry room/cellar. Scared the ever-living fuck out of me with its hiss and gaping snarl. I would not want to come anywhere near one of them. Eventually, the thing expired in an old cardboard box, and I had to fish its putrid remains out. Yuck.
Possums of the world, unite!
{Insert Dame Edna quote here}
And it was glaring at you with hatred…
Since possums are rare in your area and you have never seen one there before, when did you find out about the risk of possums as vectors of EPM?
One of the first rules of true hunting, is that you eat what you kill. Considering you admit that you are novice to this, I’ll help you out with a couple of recipes.
http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1652,150172-240200,00.html
And don’t use the excuse that you wish he would have stayed in the woods. Remember you could have not built your house in his woods. So own it. Enjoy the stew.
It’s a 'possom. You only think you killed it.
And we have a winner.
I dunno. Did you read that first recipe that Omar Little posted? LOL!
I think people may read this as sarcasm, and hell, maybe that’s how you meant it. Or not.
In any case, I agree. It’s a shitty thing to have to kill, but sometimes it’s necessary to kill a varmint in a wooded area, if they pose a problem.
I think the apology does make a difference.
It was sarcasm, the apology is worthless to the animal that got a bullet in its head. I know that animals aren’t people and the thing had no clue what he was saying, but even if it did it would be pointless. If somebody was about to shoot you in the head would you give a shit that they said “Sorry”?
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an opposum, I’m not terribly worked up about it and I don’t think the OP is some kind of monster but shooting it was unnecessary. At least, shooting it the first time it comes around. If the thing was a problem then fine, do what you’ve got to, but if you put cat food outside in a rural area and a wild animal comes to it, well, what do you expect?
I do understand concern for your pets but you could probably scare the hell out of the thing and drive it away and not put food (which in this case is essentially wild animal bait) out and it likely won’t come back. Or if you want to go the extra mile trap it and move it away. Shooting it because you saw it once is, at least IMO, a severe overreaction.
I have helped kill meat rabbits using this method. Done right it snaps the neck and humanely dispatches the animal. I’m not commenting about whether your neighbor was right to kill the opossum or not, just that his chosen method was humane.
Well of course! Can you imagine was it was thinking…?
ya know, I’ve scrounged this ‘burg from the White Mountains to Canada. I’ve stole trash from back-woodsman & Boston Elite alike. Hell, I’ve stole the batteries out of a transistor radio just for playing Frank.FM. Just to be Mean.
I’m not sorry. Yeah, I know I’m bad. Yeah, I know I deserve to die; I’m not complaining’ about that. An AR-15 I could take. An AK I probably deserve. A Mossberg is probably better than I deserve (too quick). But a CZ-452 Scout!? Dear Og, That Thing’s Pink!!!
No, Don’t send me to Hell with a Pink rifle. What would all the other Possum say? For all eternity? No. No! NO!!!"
You can’t scare hell out of possums and drive them away - I’ve tried. They used to run back and forth on top of our stone wall to eat the figs, at 2 am. The dogs would bark at them, I’d come downstairs with a broom or some such thing, figuring it’s a wild animal, it’ll run away, right? Wrong. Things are so damn dumb they’d just stand there and hiss at me. I’d poke them with the broom or whatever and tell them Run Away Stupid, and they’d just stand there and hiss at me.
So fine, after a few nights of that I started playing possum baseball - whacking them off of the wall into the boulevard behind and hoping they’d get run over. I wasn’t taking any chance on one of those stupid things biting one of the dogs. And even then they didn’t learn to stay off my wall, so we finally took down all the fig vines and that took care of it.
As for live traps, if the OP doesn’t have animal control, he isn’t likely to be able to get a live trap, at least not without buying one himself. Even if you do have animal control, sometimes you still can’t get a trap - I’ve tried so I could trap some feral kittens. Apparently the ones that our animal control had kept coming up missing so they just weren’t replaced.
I know there are people that think there must be a way to not kill any living thing, but possums? They are just big rats and need killin’
Alas, you were more maneuverable than I. You should have taken advantage of that fact.