Crashing and Bashing
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I just got home from work a few minutes ago. It's quarterly report time and the boss said if I got mine done before Monday morning I could take a vacation day to do some household projects. It turned out to be a bit more involved this time (or maybe I just got wound up on the analysis) but I figured finishing it at 3:00 AM was better than working all day tomorrow.

I almost killed someone tonight. I was heading home, minding my own business (and, I might add, traveling under the speed limit). I was driving down a dark street, approaching an intersection when a guy dressed all in black in a wheelchair came down the sidewalk ramp into the crosswalk. I slammed on my brakes and managed to miss the guy. Mind you, it's 3:00 AM, it is drizzling, he's wearing black shoes, black pants and a black jacket, there are no street lights, he shoots out in front of me from behind a tree and then has the ##### (whatever, you fill in the blank...) to flip me off.

Now, normally I'm pretty laid back about what other people do or say. I kind of operate under the assumption that what you think of me is none of my business. But, for some reason, this really annoys me. Makes me wish there was a handgun season for shooting idiots.

So, anyway, I'm reading a bit, and come across a story about an Australian lawmaker who is encouraging Australians to bash cane toads in the head. Cane Toads are apparently nasty business, are a menace to indigenous wildlife and are spreading. So David Tollner is asking his countrymen to kill toads.

Liberal Party lawmaker David Tollner said Monday the best way to stop the spread of the animals is to hit them on the head, as he did when he was a child.

"We hit them with cricket bats and golf clubs and the like back then," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"If people can be encouraged to do it, rather than discouraged, the better our chance will be of stopping the cane toads," he added.

OK, so it isn't the most savory, heart-warming story. I guess bashing toads wouldn't be my recreation of choice, but if it was my patriotic duty, well, I think you could probably count me in, at least for a couple of hours on the weekend. The thing that caught my eye and set my eyes to rolling up in my head was the last line of the piece:

Animal welfare groups say bludgeoning cane toads is inhumane, and the best way to kill them is to freeze them.

First off, what kind of self-respecting animal welfare activist gives tips on killing animals? Of course, we aren't talking about cute and cuddly here, so maybe it isn't that hypocritical. After all, cute, furry animals are a lot easier to romanticize in that hopelessly anthropocentric, Walt Disney way. Cane Toads are ugly, obnoxious and secrete noxious substances that kill the cute, cuddly (carnivorous) animals that try to eat them, so I guess that makes it OK.

But, let me ask you this: If you were of a mind to kill a toad, would you pick him up, bring him into the house and put him in your freezer for however long it takes to kill a toad, or would you just beat the bloody thing over the head with a large, heavy (and preferably long) object until it was dead, being careful, of course, not to get any toad guts on your shoes?

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, April 11 2005 03:23:02 AM