Rule 4 Violation

Be Sure of Your Target and What is Beyond It

The manager of a cookie factory in Wisconsin decided to clear out some of the birds from his factory with a shotgun.  At least one pellet of bird shot missed its target and struck one of his employees.

Where do I begin?  First, using a shotgun inside of a structure to kill nuisance animals is the wrong answer.  You're more likely cause harm to the structure and its contents, living or otherwise, than you are to scare off the critters.

Next, he obviously didn't make sure his employees weren't down range.  It's only by sheer dumb luck that the employee only dug one piece of lead out of his head, and wasn't hurt more seriously.  Don't start with the "bird shot won't kill" argument.  My son's Red Ryder BB gun will kill if it hits the right part of the body at the right angle.

Then of course there's the fact that there are bleeding birds flying around in the rafters of a food factory.  We will occasionally have a bird get into our house through the basement door, and once we flush it out of the house or the cats catch it, there's always a mess to clean up.  I can't imagine the mess that a number of birds living in a building will create, but I can sure imagine where it will land.   How this situation got past the local health department is beyond me.

I sincerely hope that the employee who was shot has no long-term problems, the blunt skull who peppered him with bird shot is punished, and that the cookie company calls a real exterminator.   Moron gun owners like this give the rest of us a bad reputation.

Now y'all excuse me while I go downstairs to check which brands of cookies are in our stockpile.