The groundhog catapult incident
I originally posted this in a comment reply, but decided it deserved to be its own post.
OK, as requested, here's my recollection of events that led to the groundhog catapult incident. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
It all started when my car wouldn't start one morning. Tried to jump it but wouldn't budge. Since it was under a certified pre-owned warranty, I had it towed to the dealer & got a ride to work from a friend. The dealer called later that day & informed me that something had been chewing things under the hood, including the 4AWG starter wire, a motor mount, and a bunch of other wires. Of course this kind of damage wasn't covered under warranty, so I had to pay around $600 out of pocket.
Got it home and everything was fine, until the car's alarm went off one early evening. I looked outside & saw a large groundhog crawling out from under the car. This time they chewed into a bunch more wiring and shredded but didn't puncture the stainless steel braided oil line for the turbo. I spent an entire Saturday in June sweating & swearing fixing things that were almost unreachable and by the end, I was ready to declare war.
After discussing options with my best friend and landlord, lets call him Brian, we decided to trap them live. We are in the middle of a small midwestern city and not a good idea to be shooting at small moving targets regardless of legality. So I pick up a couple live traps off Amazon, and bait them with various things and set by the edge of the woods where we've seen the groundhogs (6 now, 2 adults and 4 babies). I leave them set in the morning, and when I get home from work there is one caught. I immediately released it in a rural park about 10 miles away and across a river. Not taking any chances on these guys finding their way home.
Over the next couple weeks, I caught 3 of the babies and one adult, plus a small racoon. Then it got hot out. I came home one afternoon to find the final adult groundhog dead in the trap. Poor thing had probably dehydrated in the near triple digit heat. Not having a good way to bury it right then, I decided I would dump it in the woods next to our house and hope some animal would carry it off.
The next day was cooler & rainy, so I didn't really think too much about the dead animal 100 yards away. Then 4th of July weekend rolls around. Friday morning I walk outside to a balmy 90 degree humid day and almost threw up it smelled so bad. Our friends from Minnesota were coming to town for all kinds of drinking, grilling, more drinking, and of course fireworks. I had to do something to minimize the smell, so like any good pyromaniac I decided to burn the groundhog corpse where it sat. This worked for half a day at best, and later that night when our MN buddy, I'll call him Jeff, got to town, all seemed right in the world. We stayed up half the night drinking & catching up on what we’d all been doing for the 6 months since we’d seen each other.
Saturday we were having a cookout with some additional friends, and we all got up early to get the smoker going & meat prepped. Cleaning up empties & trash from the night before, Jeff noticed the smell & almost heaved. Clearly something had to be done, but none of us were in a condition to face the dead animal head-on. About noon as temps rose into the 90s again, we decided to burn the critter again. This time with citronella oil as it was thought this might help cover up the smell. It actually worked for a while. In fact guests arrived for the BBQ & nobody noticed or at least mentioned it.
Late Saturday night/Sunday morning we started smelling the critter again, and having graduated from beer to bourbon straight out of the bottle, Jeff announced that we had to do something about it. Brian grabbed a spade from the basement. We debated digging a hole & burying the thing where it laid. Jeff had grander plans. We live in a historic district at the top of a big hill. The front yard slopes down to the road at about a 45 degree slope, altogether the house and main part of the yard are probably 50’ vertically higher than the road on average. Taking the shovel and a big pull off the bottle, Jeff picked up the critter & carried it towards the front hill. The 3 of us stuck together for moral support, and I think took turns carrying the load as the smell was so bad nobody could stand to be that near it for the entire ~100 yard walk from the back corner of the yard to the front.
At the top of the hill, Jeff lofted the rotten, twice burnt groundhog corpse clear across the road. The results were gruesome: it landed half on/half off the curb. The best part was watching pedestrians the next day. The road is busy most days, but 4th of July weekend is especially busy with pedestrians, being uniquely between the two major fireworks displays in the city, and a major bus route. People would be huffing & puffing walking up the long hill in the heat, get near the rotten animal, and immediately cross the street to get away from it. The city or somebody finally cleaned it up about a week later.
Oh, and if you were keeping track of the numbers: Yes, one of the baby groundhogs never got trapped. It has since become full grown, and despite several summers of setting traps and additional car damage, I’ve not been able to trap the thing. Does this mean we won the battle but lost the war?