# "Somebody tied rubber gloves to our trees!" - Why? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 28, 2012, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/somebody-tied-rubber-gloves-to-our-trees-why/620234 "2012-04-28T14:51:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![ChickenLegs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecc23a/32.png) [@ChickenLegs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChickenLegs)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2012, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/somebody-tied-rubber-gloves-to-our-trees-why/620234/81 "2012-04-30T18:11:19Z")
Yay! P.S. Birdshot is certainly lethal. And beanbags might be to a five-year old. ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2012, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/somebody-tied-rubber-gloves-to-our-trees-why/620234/82 "2012-04-30T18:20:20Z")
> [@Arabella\_Flynn](#): > > Quite likely they wanted to do something mind-boggling but not destructive. In high school, my friends would occasionally go out and “potato” people’s lawns – just buy a bag of potatoes at the grocery store and heave them out the car windows into the middle of someone’s front yard as they drove past. This reminds me of the time many years ago when my coworkers and I discovered that somebody had dumped a 12-pack of empty beer cans in our store’s parking lot. The boss was out on an errand at the time, so we went to the convenience store next door and bought 12 powdered-sugar donuts to go with the 12 beer cans. We placed the empty cans in random places around the “employees-only” parts of our store. Then we took a single bite out of each donut and set one down next to each empty can. Boss came back later and started finding these things all over, and was all, “WTF?” 😛 > [@Doctor\_Who](#): > > I just wanted to point out how dangerous these are because the OP says he wants to use them because he doesn’t want a gun with regular ammo in the house. I think a lot of people are under the impression these are happy safe rainbow rounds when the reality is they are dangerous. And, if shit really craters and they are used against you or discharged inadvertently, they are likely to cause serious harm even death. When I was a young boy, my dad had gotten hold of some lightweight, hollow plastic bullets for one of his revolvers. They were intended strictly for indoor target shooting, supposedly designed to disintegrate on impact with a hard surface. He was showing them to _his_ dad, and to demonstrate how utterly harmless they were (in the property-damage sense - you still wouldn’t want to get shot with one), he fired a round at the side of Grandpa’s new truck. It didn’t penetrate, but it sure left a nice, obvious bullet-dent! Mind you, my dad wasn’t/isn’t an idiot about guns - he’s been a hunter since he was old enough to shoot, spent four years in the USMC, and was a police officer. He’s very conscious of gun safety. This incident was simply the same kind of misunderstanding, that “non-lethal” =/= “harmless”. (Also, this incident took place at my grandparents’ place, on a private road way out in the country. I’m pretty sure my dad wouldn’t have pulled that stunt in our own suburban neighborhood.) ---
**Author:** ![control-z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/eada6e/32.png) [@control-z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/control-z)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2012, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/somebody-tied-rubber-gloves-to-our-trees-why/620234/83 "2012-04-30T21:02:10Z")
> [@flyboy](#): > > Apparently the gardener didn’t have anything to mark the trees they’d decided on and so used rubber gloves because he didn’t have whatever he usually uses. So did you shoot him? j/k, but I totally understand your initial concerns. Your yard and home = your castle and it’s disturbing when someone violates that for weird and/or unknown reasons. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/somebody-tied-rubber-gloves-to-our-trees-why/620234.md?page=4)