In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.
The religious right is motivated by the suspicion that someone, somewhere,
is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.
So six cows wandered into a backcountry cabin and froze to death. So what's the U.S. Forest Service's answer to the problem? Blow up the cows with explosives, of course. Because explosives will somehow make a couple tons of beef just disappear, rather than spray it all over the countryside in a nasty rain.
I have a video of this bright idea in action:
Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the "It's raining cow!" Penguin
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News to me and it's right up the road.
ReplyDeleteOne thing for sure is some people should not be allowed to think and make decisions.
Send 25 cadets on a mission with shovels instead of guns and dig a huge hole to bury these animals. Would not be fun but it would solve the problem.
They can't be serious about blasting but they are. YIKES!
Dealt with a dead cow (had one of ours drop dead...). First if they starved to death they might be lighter than usual but we are talking about 500 > 1000 lbs of rather awkward weight. If they are frozen/tangled together that complicates things. Also if they stayed in the cabin for a while there is a layer of bovine byproduct + everything in there is probably broken/smashed.
ReplyDeleteYou might not be able to get them out the door as they've frozen into shapes that don't fit (amazing what they can squeeze into). The cabin might have to disassembled to get them out.
Anyway faced with this mess and having a limited time do anything about it and probably very limited manpower, and frozen ground (digging cow sized holes in frozen/rocky ground with limited topsoil is not easy). So blowing the whole thing up makes reasonable sense.
FWIW, dealing with our dead cow was a little easier, we had a front loader and a willing neighbor who wanted to cut it up for dog food. Still it's not easy and at 12,000 the difficulties get huge.
Jim, blowing the cows up makes perfect sense if you're wanting to rain chunks of cow and cabin onto a large area (view that whale video again, okay?). But explosives merely redistribute things to new locations (in hopefully smaller more easily-moved chunks), they don't make things go away. Given the terrain this cabin is sitting in, there's no -- zero -- hope that they could gather up the chunks of blown-up cabin and blown-up cow, they'll be spewed all over the landscape and visible for years (well, the chunks of blown-up cabin anyhow).
ReplyDeleteWhen all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all your country makes anymore is weapons, everything looks like a target.
ReplyDeleteYou can use the episode to practice your diction: "How now, blown cow?"
ReplyDeleteWhy in the hell would the highway department have anything to do with removing a whale from a beach? It's not like it was on a highway.
ReplyDeleteIf they wanted to vaporize the carcases, they should have used a nuke. Using conventional explosives to dispose of large animals is similar in effect to hitting a dog turd with a hammer.
ReplyDeletePhil, I used to see sarcastic reich-wing bumper stickers saying "Nuke the Whales!" Time for one now about nuking cows...
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