Where the wild things are

So much of the news lately has been about two-legged wild things, armed and insanely dangerous.

The old coot in Kansas City who grievously injured Ralph Yarl, who knocked at the wrong door when he was doing what 16 years olds with new licenses always do: picking up his kid brothers. 

The angry hilltopper in Upstate New York who killed 20 year old Kaylin Gillis who had the misfortune to be a passenger in a friend's car who, on a dark road, mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway.

The Texas cheerleaders who hopped in the wrong car - it looked just like theirs - and whose apologies weren't enough for the fellow whose car door they opened. He went after the girls and opened fire.

In North Carolina, a six year old's basketball rolled into a neighbor's yard. That neighbor opened fire on the little girl and her dad, seriously injuring the man. (The little girl suffered minor physical injuries, but one can only imagine the psychological trauma inflicted on her.)

The two jamokes in Florida who got in a road rager. Both of their kids were wounded in the crossfire.

The colossal moron in Missouri - sporting a snappy tee-shirt bearing the logo of the US Concealed Carry Association - who, when he found the meat department in the grocery store closed, decided to pack up his own damned steaks. When he was told to stop, he unconcealed his carry and put a gun to a store employee's throat so he could get the steaks weighed and bagged.

With all this wilding going on, it's hard to worry about the animal world but, maybe it's the crazy in the air, but our furred and feathered friends are, increasingly, coming after us, too.

In quaint Nahant, on the North Shore of Boston, the town council was planning on hiring Federal sharpshooters to thin their coyote population. The town hadn't experienced a "dingo's got my baby" moment, but a little pupper had been dog-napped and done away with at the hands and jaw of a coyote.

Closer to home, a coyote was spotted a few months back in the Boston Public Garden, which is my front yard.

Wild turkeys, those nasty bastards, are everywhere. Recently, one deliberately flew into a letter carrier in Cambridge. Once it knocked him down, it started pecking at him. The postman ended up having to have a hip replacement.

The other evening, while out walking, I passed a Boston Animal Control worker who'd just parked and was walking down the street with a net. I asked what he was after, and he told me there was an injured goose. I didn't say what was on my mind, which was that I hoped he was too little, too late. We could use one less goose crapping along every path that someone walking in Boston would want to walk down.

A few weeks ago, my upstairs neighbors spotted a dead rat on their front balcony.

How did it get there, we all wondered?

Did someone find it on the sidewalk and hurl it up onto their balcony? You'd have to be pretty drunk or out of it to pick a rat up and shotput it up a flight. 

The other theory of the case is that a hawk - and, yes, we have a few hawks in the 'hood, mostly, as far as I can tell, preying on pigeons - swooped the rat up and then spotted something more savory. A pigeon perhaps. So the hawk dropped the rat.

Rats are, of course, all over the urban place, and every week or so I come across a flattened corpse. Yay! When I'm out and about at dusk, I often see them scurrying around. And they do tend to sup on whatever they can scrounge from trash bags put out a bit too early.

There are rat traps everywhere in the neighborhood. In front gardens. Up against trees. Pushed up against the side of buildings.

But coming across one perched on the side of the sidewalk around the corner - one with a plump rat's arse hanging out - was a new one for me.  

I spotted this on the Friday before Boston Marathon weekend, when the city was packed with runners and tourists. And since I live in a neighborhood where a lot of these runners and tourists are strolling through, I figured that the City of Boston might want to get this one out of sight.

The City of Boston did.

Within a few hours of sending them an email - pic attached - they had removed the offending trap avec rat. I received an email telling me that the rat was one of the larger ones they've seen. Since rats are so squishy, I'm not sure if this one was just too fat to get into the trap, or whether the trap was occupado.

In either case, rat be gone!

I guess we all just have to get used to living where the wild things are. 

I just hope Massachusetts manages to stay a relative oasis of sanity when it comes to guns.