Florida Deputies Taser Unruly Emu

[Tanuki Racoon]

Fla. deputies Taser Plop-Plop the unruly emu August 21, 2008 4:18 PM EDT

PANAMA CITY, Fla. - Bay County Sheriff's deputies were forced to use a Taser to subdue an escaped emu named Plop-Plop. The large female bird escaped from a farm last weekend and on Monday, she holed up with some horses and goats in a pen.

When deputies arrived, the emu "went kind of crazy," said Sheriff's deputy Randolph Grob.

The deputies didn't want the bird to hurt itself or them, so the used the Taser stun gun to immobilize Plop-Plop.

The emu was brought to the Bay County Animal Control Center, where she has made a full recovery. The bird's owner is expected to take her home soon.

[Cole Parker]

A sad, sad tale, and a sign of our times.

Few things are as odious as bird abuse. The poor creatures cannot defend themseleves; their only recourse is a raucus squawk.

Sending fifty-thouusand volts through one who's simply being unruly seems unjust and unusual punishment to me. I'd like to see the scoundral who perpetrated this deed have the favor returned. I'd be happy to be the one to apply the electrodes to him to be assured the tingling would be administered in the perfect spots.

I will say, I was somewhat surprised -- note my reticence: I didn't say shocked -- the bird survived. I guess it simply proves what I've always tought. Emus are tough old birds.

C

[Guest Fritz]

Ah Cole, birds are not as defenseless as you might think. I refer you to the following article in the Christian Science Monitor.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0610/p01s03-usgn.html

From personal experience I would add that geese are far from defenseless and will both peck you and pummel you with their wings and even at fifteen years of age I was unwilling to continue battle with a Toulouse gander I was sent to butcher. In Bend, Oregon they had such a severe problem with wild geese in a city park that they had to take measures to deal with it. The geese would attack children and even adults on occasion. The problem was severe enough to where they fed the geese food laced with a birth control drug to keep the population of geese under control. I also know of one instance where a Sandhill Crane killed a wildlife biologist with its beak. The biologist was attempting to band the crane so it could be tracked and identified.

[Trab]

Do you think this crane might have been a female, in which case the poor biologist was hen-pecked to death?

[The Pecman]

From personal experience I would add that geese are far from defenseless and will both peck you and pummel you with their wings...

My partner Rod and I still laugh about the time we visited Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and got attacked by a herd of vicious geese. It was like a scene out of a Monty Python movie! We ran screaming to our car, then laughed like idiots for ten minutes.

"Nasty, sharp, pointed teeth!"

[Guest Fritz]

Trab, sorry but I have no idea whether or not the crane was female since the biologist telling about the death didn't include that information. However, I like your reasoning because it appears that your sense of humor is almost as sick as mine.

Pecman, a herd of vicious geese? I mean I could overlook the part about the "Nasty, sharp, pointed teeth!" because it feels like it when they are pecking the hell out of you, but everyone knows it is a gaggle of geese unless they are in flight when they become a flock. I would add that my encounter with the vicious gander necessitated a band aid on my forehead just above my left eyebrow. Had he struck slightly lower I would likely have lost my sight in that eye. Still, I can understand his position since I was there to behead him and prepare him to be cooked for Thanksgiving and I doubt that he was looking forward to such a demise. Said gander survived that Thanksgiving, but met his end at Christmas through my use of a shotgun.

[Cole Parker]

Uh, Fritz?

I was writing that with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. It was meant to be droll, not factual.

Geese can indeed be obstreperous creatures. One of the things that makes them so scary is the bellicose attitude they adopt on the spur of the moment. They abruptly come after you very clearly bent on mayhem, and their attack when you weren?t expecting it, very suddenly puts you into fight or flight mode, and most of us back off, not wanting a bloody, fight-to-the-death battle with a deranged creature who?s so obviously willing and eager for the fray. Their heart seems to be in it much more than ours does.

I don?t really know the propensities of emus, but as they?re very good sized birds with large feet and hard, sharp talons at the ends of strong legs, I certainly wouldn?t want one acting up all over me. Faced with one determined on disembowelment, with me the intended disembowelee, if I was lucky enough to have anything from a taser to an uzi, I?m sure I?d use it at the critical moment when it was down to the emu or me. Being kind to our feathered friends at that juncture would be the last thing on my mind.

C

[Guest Fritz]

Sorry Cole, I missed the irony and I should have known better. Upon rereading it I can't understand how I missed that. Ah well, no real harm done and we did get a cute story out of the Pecman. I can certainly identify with him and his actions after my experiences with angry geese. However, his story does leave me wondering where his handle came from. I mean I can think of a couple of reasons for it, but now I wonder if the more obvious one is correct. Was there some deeply hidden reason for him picking it?

[Cole Parker]

Perhaps Peckedman would have been more appropriate?

C

[DesDownunder]

...Faced with one determined on disembowelment, with me the intended disembowelee,...C

Depends on what part of the emu's body was going to be used as the instrument of disembowelment doesn't it?

[The Pecman]

but everyone knows it is a gaggle of geese unless they are in flight when they become a flock...

Oh, give me a break from proper grammar. I'm dashing out 1st-draft messages on a bulletin board, not writing a novel here.

It was a sh!tload of geese. How's that?

(At least you didn't try to correct me about geese having teeth. Normally, birds don't, but I could swear these did. Nasty creatures, however you want to term them.)

[The Pecman]

On a different topic: anybody remember British comedian Rod Hull, the guy from the 1970s and 1980s who would come onto talk shows and variety shows with a life-size Emu puppet under one arm? Inevitably, the puppet would go nuts and attack the host of the show.

It was a one-joke bit, but jesus, the guy was funny. I worked for about six months for a company owned by TV talkshow host Merv Griffin, and I still remember a time when the Emu attacked Merv on his show. The crew laughed throughout the entire commercial break, and was still laughing when they came back to the show.

[Lugnutz]

[JamesSavik]

Somebody needs to take the tasers away from the cops, they've gone loco with them.

[Tanuki Racoon]

I notice our resident Emu hasn't chimed in on this assault on his kin.

[Trab]

Somebody needs to take the tasers away from the cops, they've gone loco with them.

In Canada they are under review, serious scrutiny. It is popularly felt that the cops think of them as harmless, when in actual fact they are not even close to being harmless. There is of course our very public screw up where someone died in the Vancouver airport and all that was wrong was he couldn't communicate in English and nobody tried to figure out what was wrong and after some 10 hours he got pissed off. It's created quite the international incident since it was a foreign national.

[JamesSavik]

They can be, and often are fatal to people with minor/undiagnosed heart defects.

That is why so many people are being killed by these "harmless" tasers.

You simply can't zap a human being with all that voltage and expect everyone to survive.

It will probably take some senator's drunk & disorderly kids to get killed before anything will be done about them.

[Camy]

I notice our resident Emu hasn't chimed in on this assault on his kin.

I'm egg shocked! 'tis an awful thing to see one's relatives tasered like this, and worse that someone had the temerity to call her Plop-Plop.