Okay, it has nothing to do with possums, but it was just about the creepiest thing I ever saw. Several years ago (1993, I think), I was in Quintana Roo, Mexico on a family vacation. We were driving to a beach, and at the little booth where you pay to get in, a horse was lying, bloody, apparently with a broken neck, on the road ahead of us. My family was very much spooked by the scene.
My dad had to kill a possum once because our dog had trapped it in an unused cistern or something. I don’t think he considered whether the possum would hurt the dog, although now that I think about it, the dog was a fox terrier/chihuahua mix and probably wasn’t any bigger than the possum. Dad says he just didn’t want it to die being torn to pieces by the dog, so he got his pistol (a .22, I think)in order to kill it humanely. Well, as already mentioned in other posts on this thread, possums are quite capable of surviving several shots from a small-calibur pistol. My dad wound up killing it with a hammer.
And, for the record, my dad is a very gentle person. He went hunting once and when he saw the deer he couldn’t kill it. HE says he just couldn’t get a good shot and he didn’t want to injure it without killing it, but my mom says he couldn’t kill it because it was too beautiful. (if he finds out I told all of you strangers this, I’d be in big trouble)
I do know a guy who was foolish enough to put an armadillo in the trunk of his car. He wanted to show it off to his friends. He neglected to consider, however, that armadillos are, by nature, diggers. It had nearly burrowed through the back seat by the time he opened the trunk.
I’m from Texas. Can you tell?