On Wed, 11 Feb 2015 08:00:13 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

wrote:

On Tue, 10 Feb 2015 20:37:26 -0700, rbowman
wrote:

wrote:

So, I'm looking for another method to get rid of this opossum. I'd like
to do it as humanely as possible, but will do whatever I must, since
it's already done a lot of damage by knocking things over and crapping
on stuff.

Any suggestions on what to use? Such as poison????

Baseball bat? Shovel? Hoe? It's only a damn possum.
They look a lot more fierce than they are.

I'd heard about possums and probably saw them in zoos but I never ran into
one in the wild until I was working a contract in Fort Wayne. Sure enough,
it hissed, drooled, and played dead when I wasn't impressed.by the threats.
I put them right up there with blue heelers. God made the animal, looked at
the results, and said "Let's try that one again."

King snakes use the same tact. First they do a good impersonation of a
****ed off rattlesnake. If that doesn't seem to be working, they launch into
the dead snake act. King snakes are a lot prettier than possums though.


Ok, here's my possum story. Two actually. I live in NYC and have a
small backyard, 18" by 50" which tends to get very overgrown by
August. I have it fenced in, with fencing curving in at the top, so I
can let my cats roam around without them getting out. One August I'm
trying to find Espy, a cat with a mostly white face and a pink nose. I
pick up a bit of an evergreen so I can look under it, and there is a
whitish face with pink nose, but the nose is way too long. Yikes.

I get a stick, lift up more evergreen, and whatever it is is lying on
its side looking dead, and drooling. I panic a bit, fearing that it
might have harmed Espy, but I find him elsewhere and rush him inside
and then call Animal Control. Much to my surprise, Animal Control only
deals with cats and dogs. Anything else has to be sick or wounded.
Well, I tell the nice lady, I think it might be dying and it's
drooling. Yes, she replies, it's playing possum. Oh. That's what it
is.

So she tells me to call an animal trapper and I do so. But he tells me
that possums are fairly common in the backyards, and that they do more
good than harm and tend to move on after a few days. For $50 he'll
collect it and drop it in a rural area, but why don't I just let it be
and see what happens. After all, he says, it eats all the grubs and
insects that do actual harm. Well, I don't want it huting my cats, but
he tells me that it's probably been back there with the cats for a few
days, and they generally leave each other alone.

So that's what I did. Nothing. After a few days it was gone. It had no
problem climbing over the fence that kept my cats in. Of course, my
cats really don't want to roam but the possum does.

A year or two later, I'm working on the computer and see two of my
cats sitting in the hallway looking down at something. Oh oh. Whatever
it is doesn't look like something that belongs in my hallway. It's not
a bird, and too big to be a mouse, yet not a rat. Oh. Baby possum. I
pick it up with paper towels and it moves. Not dead. I take it outside
and it bites my hand. Stop that. I stick it through the chainlink
fence into my neighbor's yard. As it goes through the fence, it grabs
the fence with its rear foot. That's when I realized that they have
opposable thumbs on their hands and feet. Very cool.

Then it dropped into the groundcover and wandered off. Twice more that
day I had to rescue a baby possum from one of my cats. One was running
around the yard with a possum in its mouth. But none of them were
harmed by the cats, which is sort of unusual since cats are pretty
much hard-wired killers.

A week or two later I spotted a half grown possum on a neighbor's
steps, so at least one of the graduating class made it that far
towards adulthood.

Possums have a tough life and they're really pretty interesting
creatures. Marsupials (sp?), like the kangaroo, bearing live young who
then live in a pouch. The only Marsupials in North America.

So when I read about folks that want to kill possums, I try to put in
a good word for them.