Unintentionally: A pictus catfish in my aquarium. Medicated the tank with the wrong stuff, which destroyed the catfish’s ability to detect food, and it didn’t last too long after that.
Intentionally: Snails from the garden.
Morally responsible for but not directly involved: Various tasty mammals, the largest probably being bison.
I allowed my sister-in-law to selectively reduce the babies my mouse just had. She had 18 of them, and she was pretty much ignoring them and I was afraid they would starve! SIL reduced their numbers down to 10 and now they are fat, well-fed , cute little mices. I don’t know what exactly she did to them, but I was a party to the process, whatever it was. I had bad dreams about it.
Of course , the mice were only 3 days old ,and this is Florida, so the giant yellow grasshoppers and the palmettos are much larger than the baby mice. I don’t feel bad about killing them, though.
Helped slaughter a half dozen or so thanksgiving turkeys I’d helped raise on a petting farm that summer. All of us summer folk who came back to help kill and clean got one. I took home a 30-pounder. Best turkey we ever had.
Like chickens, they flop around wildly for a while but unlike chickens, they’re too uncoordinated to actually run around without a head. It is a bizarre sight.
I join the ranks of untintentional kitty murderers.
An angus bull that had broken his leg trying to mate with one of our hieffers. He weighed nearly a ton. Damn, that was a difficult animal to butcher.
A pigeon. Accidentally. With my car.
I killed a cat on the road driving at night about a year ago.
I’ve killed deer while hunting.
This fall I will kill an elk with a bow in Colorado.
I have shot both Grouse and Pheasant and strangled a few that just got winged.
I had to kill my friends hamster that appeared to have had an anal prolapse or something, it’s insides were hanging out of it’s ass and as it was the weekend no vets were open except for (very costly) emergency call-outs. I gassed it.
Various creepy-crawlies.
Half a dozen whitetailed deer (2 bucks and 4 does) the biggest was maybe 150 lbs.
A wild boar that weighed about 200 lbs and had 2 1/2 inch tusks. It was less then 50 yards away when I shot him, and after I shot him I immedietly climbed a tree so he couldn’t gore me. Luckily he made it only about half way before he “expired.”
A Raccon unintentionally. I had a 84 Fiero at the time and can still remember the crunching.
I ran over a woodchuck once. When I was a biology student, I had to kill Xenopus frogs (actually, ice, behead, pith, gut, and castrate them).
Moose. Don’t know what it weighed. But it was a shit-load as we had to cut into chunks and pack it over a river to the horses.
I am sure it was several tons.
“The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old.” Kidding!bonus points for naming the movie
The biggest thing I unintentionally killed was a possum. You really feel that as you go over them…don’t want to again, that’s for sure.
The biggest thing I’ve ever intentionally killed was probably a member of the spider family. Or by mass, all those slugs I tempted to their own doom with beer.
I was horrified to learn a couple of weeks that people use live fish as bait to catch strippers. Not little fish like minnows either, but ones as big as my hand. Sunfish, maybe? I never realized that people do something like that when they’re not trying to catch, say, sharks. They caught big strippers though, the two I saw had to be two feet long! I really really wanted to throw them back, but I figured it wasn’t a good way to befriend strange fishermen I see while taking walks on break. No, I do no fish. I do not eat any of type fish. I love my goldfish dearly. But I like red meat, go figure.
Well, I’ve done several whitetail deer, around the 100-120# mark.
Probably the most unique small animal kill was a Bat that intersected the windshield of my truck as I came around a sharp corner at 70 mph.
/bat thoughts
<SONAR>
all clear, fields and trees…
<SONAR>
all clear, fields and trees…
<SONAR>
all clear, fields and trees…
THWAAPP!!!
/bat thoughts
Poor guy never saw me comin.
Chickens, for dinner. Not for years, though - I’d like to keep it that way.
White tail deer - 150 pounds (It was a nice 8 point buck)
Huh–and here I’ve been using twenty-dollar bills all this time.
Daniel
Aside from one of the town vagrants*, and some insects (I often catch spiders in the house and release them outside), I’ve only ever killed a mouse that invaded my grandparent’s place while they were away for a year.
A previous mouse went along peacefully. I trapped him in a ice-cream container and released him in the woods. The second had a real attitude. After torturing the dog and I for one long, sleepless night, I set up a traditional snap trap.
The dog woke me up to tell me we had got him. Actually, quite a few mice have been killed in the storage shed over the years, but the one in the house was the only one in which I felt to remorse for and actively went for the kill.
Oh, yeah. There’s also the elephant that fell from the sky and landed on the hood of our old car while I was driving. It was apparently the fall the killed it (and the car ), but I thought it would be appropriate to mention in this thread.
Anyhoo…
Grew up in Claiborne Co. TN on a small tobacco farm. Not counting 3-4 chickens a week and at least 2-3 hogs a year plus thousands of fish of all kinds, a bear about 450-540 lbs.
It came out of the woods next to our house and started tearing its way through my mom’s wash on the clothesline, with her still putting things up. She ran to the front door screaming all the way. The bear then proceeded to wreck our hen house and picked at a large smoked ham we had salted in the smoke shed. When it started clawing at and breaking into our back door, I took a 30-30 out the front door, and put three slugs in it, the bear was coming at me after the first and blood splattered on me from the third. I was 12 and 3 guys came over to help skin and dress it. My first taste of bear meat, didn’t like it much.
Northern anchovies several inches long in this case. Hook them through the nose and let them swim about. This was under the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, a prime place for “live-bait drifting” back in the old days before there was a Striped Bass crash in the bay. Yep - they were all pretty big ( I never saw less than a ten-pounder landed from that spot and most were larger than that ) and you could sometimes see them actually chase the bait down when the water was clearish. Quite thrilling, except maybe for the poor anchovy ;).