These ducks were no doubt feeling a little out of place in the parking lot of this shopping center. That’s probably why they were making their way to one of the exits, towards a large pond where all of the other ducks mingle.
There was plenty of space for you to maneuver your huge, POS van around these ducks, yet you still decided to drive over them. One of them was quick enough to move to the side, but the smaller, female one (a mallard) wasn’t so fortunate.
And you continue driving into the parking lot, completely oblivious of this poor animal that you’ve destined for death. And not just any kind of death, but a slow, painful one (one assumes, from the sounds).
To you, the driver: I sincerely hope that you are really just that out of touch with reality - that you seriously didn’t notice everything that was happening in your immediate surroundings. I hope this, because the alternative is that you’re a sadistic, heartless bastard who shouldn’t be in the possession of a driver’s license.
OTOH, if you truly didn’t notice 1) that you ran over the duck, and 2) a few pedestrians had to clean up your dirty work, then you shouldn’t have a license anyway. If for no other reason but that this duck could have very well been a small child.
To the two men, who assisted me in helping this poor animal - thank you. I’m glad that I wasn’t the only person around here who felt sympathy and pity for this creature, and sought to help end its misery. I think (and I hope I’m right) that it slipped away in the following minutes.
To the readers of this thread: I apologize for the lack of vitriol in this post; this whole thing threw me for a loop.
LilShieste
As callous as this may sound, the best, quickest way to put the duck out of its misery would have been to line up your wheels just right and run over it again.
Yeah, that guy’s an asshole. I knew people when I was growing up who enjoyed hitting dogs and cats that were in the road. I don’t know what they get out of it.
This used to be a common occurance outside my father’s buisness. There’s a skating rink directly across the street, and it’s not uncommon for the ducks to wander across the road–we’ve had some at our front door before, often a mother with babies. Dad has one story in particular that he likes to share about them. One car had stopped to let them cross safely, but the guy behind him decided to pass and killed three of them.
(I’m sure why, but for some reason they seem to stay inside the enclosure more after the pond was rebuilt)
I agree. Maybe the guy didn’t even know he hit the duck, though. (If that’s the case, then I’m not sure he knew he was even in a parking lot.)
My wife just told me a story about how someone she used to work with, in Nebraska, would purposefully try to hit prairie dogs when driving out in the field.
I have no idea where this comes from. Aren’t people supposed to “grow out of” this sort of thing?
LilShieste
To be fair, many Midwestern farmers and ranchers feel (rightly or wrongly) that prairie dogs are pests who damage crops, so there’s at least some potential logic in trying to run over them.
Deliberately running over a duck in a parking lot, though, if that was indeed the driver’s intention, doesn’t seem to have any motivation beyond mere cruelty.
What people are supposed to do and what they actually do are often very different. I know far too many people who enjoy killing small animals for no real reason. And of course they teach their kids to do the same sighs (On the upside, at least they have good aim. Still sucks for the squirrels though)
We had a vehicular duckicide incident here in San Jose a couple of years ago.
There’s a big carwash in town, built during the popular “old-timey” craze during the 60s. It features a large pond in which there is the big wheel of an ersatz paddlewheel boat. The pond has several tame ducks for the entertainment of bored children while their parents’ car is being washed. The ducks often wander out of the pond, through a parking lot, and into some landscaping for a snooze.
One morning the employees came to work to find many of the ducks crushed and killed in the parking lot. The security tapes showed some asswipe driving through the lot several times late at night, deliberately aiming for the ducks. At one point, he stopped the car, got out, and picked up little ducklings and hurled them violently against the side of his car, killing them. Unfortunately, the tapes are not quite good enough to positively identify this manly hunter. All you can make out is that it’s a youngish white guy and the car is probably a Honda or a Toyota.
The tapes are kind of sickening, and a lot of people put up rewards to find the shithead, but he has never been found.
When suddenly St. peter leads this absolutely stunning woman over to me and handcuffs us together. "What’s this for?"I asked. “I dunno about you”, she says, “but I just stepped on one of these damn ducks…”
This is just sickening. How can someone miss seeing ducks in a parking lot, for crying out loud? You’re supposed to be alert, looking for people backing out, children exiting cars, stray carts…and you miss ducks? Waddling, brightly colored wing-flapping moving objects? Fuckface. What a complete asshole.
I’d’ve loved to have been there. The cunt wouldn’t have gotten very far out of the parking lot without being made aware of his “oops!”.
It’s only for my peace of mind that I’m thinking of this as an accident. Were it otherwise…I don’t think I’d be a very nice person for a while. Stuff like this bothers me. Birds are regarded as such a nuisance by so many people, so many who just don’t understand.
Part of my ire is related to this article about 50 local ducks being possibly euthanized because some people don’t like them in their yards. It irritates their dogs. :rolleyes:
There is a lovely landscaped park all along the boulevard where I work and we have several dozen ducks in general. All residential streets, with a speed limit of 30 MPH, with duck crossing signs up. Still, somehow about three times a year, splat.
It makes me sad, but what makes me sadder is when a city worker in charge of the wildlife in the city parks in the area once asked us to stop feeding the ducks bread. It seems they can’t digest it properly and bread will cause their digestive systems to break down and they die of gas. He said he has to fish a few dozen ducks out of the various ponds each year who have died this way. I think he was being overly dramatic, or maybe he just didn’t know, but while bread is not good for ducks, it doesn’t kill them. A diet of all bread, or mostly bread will cause a duck to die of malnutrition, or a duck becoming reliant on humans for bread and losing their ability to forage can cause them to die, but in general bread in moderation isn’t harmful to ducks.
It’s amazing how we have such a close relationship with this particular animal, but so many of us know so little about them. I guess that’s really just rational ignorance though.
The area where this happened is kind of similar to what you described (except not quite as cool sounding). A couple of times, on my way to lunch, I would see a few ducks making their way across the street toward the pond. Every car that approached them while they were doing this would politely slow down and wait for them to pass, or would go around them (it’s a pretty wide road).
After what happened today I feel like I should try to hurry ducks along, next time I see them making their way to the pond. That might cause more problems than it would solve, though.
LilShieste
On my flight to Australia, I watched a documentary about cane toads. There was a scene in which a man was driving and basically swerving all over the road, trying to hit toads. I know they’re a nuisance in Australia, and I don’t particularly like toads, but I found his deliberately trying to run them over disturbing. I don’t think I would want to be friends with someone who intentionally ran over animals like that, or let them babysit my cats or my (hypothetical) children.
