Friday, September 25, 2009

Do not read if you are a sensitive soul


So I'm on a Weineramer roll. I aluded in an earlier post to the dogs eating a bluebird nest so here's the story...


I take these dogs to a forest service road on Mitchell hill in Preston. We get a few hundred feet in and they get to go off leash. Lately they have bee eating everything in sight. Blackberries, human poo, dirt, grass etc. But the worst were the blue jays.


So one day we were walking along and they started snorking around in the bushes. The male raised up his head and and had a baseball sized bundle of twigs in his mouth. "Drop it" I barked automatically. For all the problems these dogs have this seems to be a command they obey. So he dropped it.


I walked over to see what it was. It turned out to be a birds nest containing four freshly hatched chicks. Very nearly embryonic and partially chewed. Oh shit, now what do I do?


Obviously since they were on the ground at such a young age they weren't going to survive. Add to that the fact they were now chewed and these poor birds were for sure goners. I started to walk away. I came back a few seconds later. Then left and then came back. I probably spent a good ten minutes trying to decide what to do. Talking to myself and cursing on the trail. Do I walk away? Try to save them? Let the dogs finish the job? I have a huge problem with letting anything suffer. So what did I do?


I found a large rock and killed the birds. It was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I hope I never have to do it again. Now I hated it while I did it but feel no guilt now that it's done. I'm curious what would my blogger friends have done? I really see no alternative to what I did. What do you think?

5 comments:

TikiBarSoap said...

I don't know, I have super slow response time, usually I am off in my own little world, so it would have taken at least five seconds to realize the dog was in the bushes and another five or ten seconds for me to realize that the dog had a bird nest in its mouth. After that I would have just let the dog eat the bird nest, I would not have yelled "drop it". My cats will sometimes carry in a mouse or small rodent in the house in their mouth and I just carried them outside, rodent in mouth, and let them finish the job. But really there was nothing you could have done, the dog already did the damage.

dog grrrrl said...

Yeah if it was a cat I probably would have just let it finish. Fr some reason that command is right on the tip of my tongue. I couldn't go back on it once I saw what it was.

No they were goners for sure. Probably within minutes. I just didn't want them to suffer. I have a client who has horses who recently found a bunny in a stall who apparently got kicked. She had her neighbor come over and shoot it. I couldn't have dealt a bunny the same way.

hopemcp said...

The dogs' owners need to get a clue.

BeagleBaby said...

Good Job. I would have hated to have had to do that but was the best thing to do... I have two beagles and one of them is a goat. The vet has me giving both the girls green beans with Mazola oil (tsp). They love it and it helps them get the extra fiber to push all that crap out!

Beatific Gonzette said...

This might sound callous, but this is the first really entertaining blog post that I've read since I sat down and started flipping through Blogger today!

You deserve massive kudos for doing the right thing. I think that I would have called an animal rehab center with my cell phone while in the field and just panicked over the telephone at them. Not a terribly adult way to go about things.

I also may have put the birds into a box and driven them to the nearest vet clinic to be put down via injection. But your action was much faster and it didn't disturb them the way moving them around would have, so even though it was more gory I think that it was also much more humane.

Either way, it was a very compelling story. Uncomfortable and gritty and all that. Thanks for sharing it!