posted 2007/04/06 at 21:28
Although we Shannons live in suburbia (or at least as close as you can get to suburbia with a big honkin' highway in your backyard), we try to keep as much nature around us as possible, so we keep fully-stocked birdfeeders in both our front and back yards, and we keep various scraps of food on our front porch for raccoons and squirrels and the like.
Unfortunately, early this morning we found one of our usual squirrel visitors on our porch bloodied, and with several puncture marks on its body. We didn't see what happened, but there's been a few dogs roaming the neighbourhood lately, and while they act friendly to humans, we're bigger than they are. The squirrel wasn't dead -- it limped away when my father tried to the cage it to take it to the vet -- but it was not a pretty sight, and unfortunately the best efforts of my father and my sister to keep my mother from seeing the squirrel (she was upstairs working in the office at the time of discovery) were in vain, and she was kind of shaken up for most of the early part of the day.
This incident took me back to my undergraduate days, as during my first year at UT I had this incident where I parked my car in a garage, and then when I was walking in the garage to get to the exit I passed a squirrel that had been run over. Now, living in this part of the country you're going to see roadkill all the time, but this was the first time I had ever been that close to it. Roadkill is gross enough when it's a somewhat-recognizable lump that you speed past fairly quickly, but when you're just walking, and you're close enough to see the animal's viscera strewn out in front of it from where the pressure of the car wheel basically squeezed it all out of the animal's body ... it's not that I don't have a healthy respect for the cycle of nature and all of that, but there are still some sides to nature that I'd rather not get that close to, thank you very much.
Anyway, we haven't seen this one squirrel since this morning, and while you want to hope for the best in these kind of circumstances, given the cold weather and all I'm guessing that the squirrel, if it hasn't died already, will probably die very soon. For our part, the next time we see those dogs roaming around, we're going to call animal control. Moments like these are why, if I ever get any pets after I get my own place, they're going to be indoor pets.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon