On my way to work I saw that someone had just killed a duck. He had pulled over around the corner and was going back to check, I guess. The duck was definitely dead. The duck’s mate was just standing there. When the man got close to it, the duck flew away.
This just makes me so sad. No, I’m not a vegetarian, so I’m really being two-faced.
There was a pair of geese hanging around here where I work and one of them got run over. I wisk they wouldn’t walk near roads. Why don’t they fly across the street?
When a goose or duck loses its mate, does it find another one? Does it die? Does it grieve? Or does it just think “oh well” and move on?
I don’t know about ducks, but pigeons “grieve”. I put quotes because, of, course, we can’t say for sure - but the behaviors exibited, if present in a human that didn’t speak my language, I would interpret as grieving.
My cat killed a pigeon that flew onto our screened in porch. Its mate spent the next 4 days coming into and out of the porch (there was an open spot at the top corner), wandering around and cooing, looking very depressed. For a pigeon, that’s awfully depressed.
Sorry you had to witness the duck’s demise. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re being hypocritical - it’s perfectly consistent, in my book, to feel remorse for the senseless accidental death of an animal, yet still be OK eating animals that are humanely killed on purpose for food.
Yep, sorry. There is nothing romantic about duck love. Drake mallards have been known to hold hen’s heads underwater and “rape” them if unable to attract a mate in the normal fashion.
I’ve been reading the dope board for some time, but felt compelled to sign up and register after reading this post.
A week ago and colleague and I watched a mother duck and a brood of 10 hatchling ducklings march by our office door. We watched them decend into our workplace pond where a goose came quickly charging towards them. The goose grasped one of the ducklings and thrashed it about and held it under water until it was dead.
Meanwhile, the mother duck viciously attacked the goose and scurried her babies to the side of the pond and into cover. The mother duck did not escape unharmed. The goose had grabbed it for a bit, going for the kill, but only got a mouthful of feathers. I had to check later, after the duckling drifted from the middle of the pond, to make sure it was completely dead and out of its suffering. Indeed, it was.
Such sensless violence!!! Mother nature, I suppose. But, it did affect me for a while. I even kept seeing duckling books, etc. for the following 48 hours or so.
Today I saw that the geese now have 6 new baby goslings. I had the feeling I wanted to stomp on one for revenge!! Nasty, nasty. Should I? :dubious:
My mother and I walk together in the early morning for exercise. One day last week, we met up with a chocolate lab which had run away from home. The evidence suggested that the dog had come from a yard with an invisible fence, dog crossed the fenceline for some canine reason we’ll never know, and was then unable cross back. So big friendly dog finds my mother and I and tried to climb up on us, etc. We kept walking, talking about how we didn’t want it to follow us home. Then, all of a sudden, we see a person walking another dog, this one on a leash. Choc. Lab wants to cross the street to see other dog, which is reasonable except for the coming cars. We watched as several cars had near misses with the dog or each other, before we were able to continue on home.
We agreed that we would have felt truly terrible if the dog had been hit right in front of us. We would not have been happy to see a dog which had been hit by a car that we didn’t observe, but it would have been worse to see it actually happen.
So count this as another vote for “there’s nothing hypocritical about being sad about the wanton, wasteful death of an animal, and being able to enjoy the results of a deliberate killing of an animal”
I found a dove in the street that was hit by a car (I’m guessing). Not dead, but clearly not going to survive. This was near my house, so I killed it and tossed it over the wall into the desert. It’s gone now, I’m guessing a skunk ate it.
Jimbobholdem, you can’t fault an animal for being an animal. They just do things like that and they have their reasons, even if we don’t understand the reasons.
I once shoed a pair of ducks out of the road near my parents’ house. I made them get back onto the sidewalk and then they went around a corner and into the nearby creek. I knew there were some people in town who would have run them over for kicks if they’d remained in the road.
[QUOTE=KRC]
Jimbobholdem, you can’t fault an animal for being an animal. They just do things like that and they have their reasons, even if we don’t understand the reasons.
Yeah, I know. I think it is similar to seeing a dog that walked with you for 5 seconds being hit by a car in front of you vs. a dog being hit by a car that you didn’t know about, which presumably happens hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day, as described in Eureka’s post.
The goose just pissed me off. I’d never smash a gosling, but it did cross my mind. I know he was just being a goose, but still he pissed me off. Geese are typically nasty little buggers anyway. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
The pond is filled with huge catfish, so I hope the little duckling made a nice meal for one of the gigantic cats.
Once my husband and I went for a walk in a nearby park that has a pond. We saw a young boy throwing rocks at the ducks. He hit one in the head, and it was very badly wounded, with blood coming from the wound. It paddled in circles for a bit, its head slumped to one side, and then it died. Its mate was there, and you could tell it was very upset.
The boy had no adult supervision, he was just there with other kids his age (maybe the adults were elsewhere in the park, or he lived in the nearby neighborhood). I might have liked to say something to him, but you could tell by his reaction when the duck died that he’ll probably never do it again.
Geese kill the offspring of food competitors to ensure that their own offspring have enough to eat. (Instinct has not yet discovered that humans might make up the difference in food sources.)
Similarly, swans will kill goslings and I know several lakes where they have imported swans to keep out the geese. (One or two pair of breeding swans will “occupy” a lake that would support eight or ten goose families, so the importation of swans seriously reduces the amount of bird poop falling into the lake to fertilize obnoxious weeds during the summer.)
There was a pair of geese in my workplace parking lot. Then another pair showed up. For several days the two pairs fought over who was going to “own” the parking lot. Then the one goose got killed in the street. Since then I’ve seen one goose there and I’ve seen two. But now I think they have all left.
Oh, I just killed a spider. I don’t feel bad about that. But I don’t kill earthworms.
Once I saw a big dog running loose. I tried three times to catch him to help him get home, but every time I got out of my car and tried to catch him he just ran around me. He was not interested in my help. This was in a neighborhood. Hopefully he found his way home.
You’re okay, Lillith Fair. I got a little teary-eyed last week when a bird slammed into one of my windows and died. At least it was quick, I suppose. But I felt so sorry for the poor birdie, because evolution didn’t prepare it for man’s rapid technological changes.
If you hit a goose in the head with a fast swing of a whiffle bat, it’s a lot like playing T-ball.
Wait. Kind of like a combination of T-ball and badminton, cos of the feathers. Yeah. Geese are nasty. Funny how something that mean is so fragile from the shoulders up, though. Kind of evens it out.
