Anyone else heard or read this story?! I don’t have a link to it, because I’ve been unable to find the actual story online yet, but somewhere in Florida a woman went to open her fridge/freezer door, and looked in on the duck her husband had shot (and apparently put in there, undressed!), and the duck turned it’s head and looked back at her!!!
She called the local animal hospital which came and picked up the duck. They in turn took the duck to a wildlife sanctuary, where it’s being treated for gunshot wounds to the wing and foot. There is a 75% chance it will survive, but it will not be able to be released into the wild again.
First off, poor duck!!! Secondly, poor lady! I just can’t imagine opening the door to the fridge or freezer and having something look back at me, something I thought was dead. And what does this say about the hunter? It says he is DUMB that he didn’t check to see if the bird was dead. I also wouldn’t want an undressed bird in my freezer - but maybe that’s commonplace with duck hunters.
Still OMG, the bird was still alive!!! And it looked at the lady!!! Which leads me to wonder … is the lady still alive now? Or did she suffer “the big one?”
My father was a big hunter and he used to pull similar things although none of them were actually alive. One time, I opened our regular kitchen freezer and a frozen coyote kind of slid out and I couldn’t help but catch it horrified. Another time, I opened our chest freezer to be greeted by two partially frozen Javelina Hogs that he shot on a hunting trip in West Texas.
I don’t know if I can get worked up about the duck. It would suck to be half dead in a fridge for two days but this duck was just part of a hunt like any other. Thousands just like him appear on restaurant menus every day and they don’t get their own news stories.
Let me see if I understand the situation. Hunter shoots a bird for food, then stores it in the fridge until time to dress and cook it. When it turns out to be alive, it is taken to a vet where it is nursed back to health, but not eaten. If it had been dead all along, it would have been dinner.
Somehow the logic escapes me. If you try to kill something, but fail, you’re supposed to change your mind about your intentions? The victim gets another chance at life just because the hunter had a poor aim? Do hunters take animal first-aid kits with them in case they just wound rather than kill?
BanG! “I killed it, so cut its head off.”
BanG! “Oops – Just a little wounded. Here, give it a bandage and let it go.”
I could have sworn the title of this thread was “Dick survives in fridge for two days” when I clicked on it. Too many threads like “Great Penis Removals of Our Time” and related penis/sperm threads going around MPSIMS right now.
Why in the world was the thing brought to an animal sanctuary? It was supposed to be dinner!
I love ducks, and I’m sort of glad he’s got a second chance, but I’m having a tough time understanding why they didn’t just break the duck’s neck when they saw he wasn’t dead. My instinct would be “injured animal! Bring him to a vet!”, but these people were going to *eat *him… so why?
There is a probably apocryphal story among ornithologists about a Snowy Owl that survived being in a freezer for a long time.
Supposedly a group of ornithologists was driving along a snowy road when a Snowy Owl swooped in front of their vehicle and was hit. They stopped, and went back to find the apparently dead owl in the middle of the road. Since specimens of this species are hard to come by, they picked it up and brought it back to their museum, where they put it in the freezer, which was packed with other specimens awaiting preparation.
According to the story, no one opened the freezer again for several weeks. When they did, they were astonished to find the owl alive and well-fed, having been living on the other specimens in fhe freezer. After all, for a Snowy Owl sub-freezing temperatures and constant darkness are part of the normal conditions of life.
I don’t really believe this story, but I would like to.
Regarding the duck, I agree that it seems quite bizarre to try to nurse the duck back to health after having shot it for food.
Situations such as this illustrate human perversity in all its glory.
Nine years ago a couple of pigs escaped from an abattoir in Malmesbury. They squeezed through a fence and went on the run. Public interest was rampant. As the linked article reports, the pigs were eventually caught and saved from the dinner table by the intervention of The Daily Mail.
Concern for these animals didn’t precipitate an avalanche of sympathy for all those pigs who weren’t smart enough to escape death in this way. We just continued eating them as per usual.
It seems that an animal whose destination is the middle of a sandwich, but which escapes that fate against all the odds, attracts some kind of respect and/or affection not given to its less fortunate brethren.
I’m baffled by the concept of not cleaning one’s game immediately. A duck would have a damn hard time coming back to life in a freezer minus his guts, and who wants to eat one that hasn’t been cleaned immediately?
as to the duck - we have runner ducks and they live outside the house and even in the storm of the beginning of the week we had here they were happily quacking away. They would probably have no trouble being in the freezer for a couple of days - but they would be seriously PISSED off when you let them out!