Some ramblings about car exhaust and death.
I handle wildlife in my job. I am called upon occasionally to euthanize sick and injured animals. Not a pleasant task , but someone needs to end an animal's suffering. In the state of Connecticut it is ILLEGAL to use car exhaust to put an animal down. Most modern cars burn very clean compared to cars built 40 years ago. There is very little CO ( carbon monoxide ) in car exhaust compared to years ago. Connecticut has made this practice of using car exhaust illegal because it takes a long time to put the animal down. That is not humane. Most of the time the animal would die of heat stress before CO poisoning.
For example , I had this job recently ......
I had a customer who called me for some problem skunks that were destroying his front yard by ripping the sod apart looking for grubs. It was really bad. I set up some traps and told the customer to check them every morning and call if a skunk was captured. He calls the next morning to tell me there is a skunk in one of the traps as he is heading out the door to go to work. I tell him I will be over to pick up the skunk after I go to two other houses that I had set traps at and the customers had also called to let me know about a capture. He says no problem and I tell him I should be to his house in about an hour and a half.
Hour and a half later I pull into his driveway. I head over to where the the 2 traps were set. There is only one trap , the other one is missing. WTF? I look all around , nowhere to be seen. I go over to the customer's front door to knock even though I am pretty sure he is not home. Nope , nobody home. I walk back over to where the traps were set and look some more. I look over on the neighbors property , maybe they might know where my trap went with the skunk. I see a VW vanwagon parked in front of the garage with the engine running. Somebody must be around if the car is running. I look and look and look for the neighbor - nothing.
THEN I notice a piece of flex pipe connected to the tailpipe of the VW going to a large rectangular cardboard box big enough to hold one of my traps .......
WTF IS GOING ON HERE ...... #$%& @*&% I am really pissed at this point.
I walk over to the neighbor's house and knock on the door. This little old lady answers the door. I explain nicely to the lady who I was and what I was doing for the neighbor and asked if she had seen my trap with the skunk. She tells me to see her adult (45yo) son back by the garage. I find the son and ask him if he has seen my skunk. He says " Sure , I taking care of him for you " and points to the cardboard box.
I immediately inform him that using car exhaust is illegal to euthanize an animal. I ask him how long the skunk has been in the box. It was there for a whole hour breathing pure car exhaust in the box. There was very few gaps in the box so I know it was not getting any fresh air just exhaust. I open the box and the skunk is still alive.
I take the skunk and tell the son to please to not mess with any of my equipment. ( No thanks , I don't need your help )
Normally I would have gone up one side of this guy and down the other plus contacting the police for criminal charges to be brought against him. The only reason I did not was my customer had no knowledge of this going on or had talked to the neighbor. The son was just trying to help his neighbor out and had no idea that I was hired to take care of the problem correctly and legally.
The guy meant well and was just trying to help and be a good neighbor and did not know the laws. Hard to fault him for trying to help out his neighbor.
He got a pass this time. He will not get a second pass by me for sure. He has been warned by me and my customer who was filled in on the day's events after he got home for work.
