“Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move, then it came running,” said McGrath. “I kicked it away, but then it got back up and came back at me again. I kicked it away again, and it came right back.” That’s when McGrath ran into his garage and shut the door, only to have the groundhog circle around to the other side of the garage and get in through a different open door. “He was out to get me,” said McGrath. “Fortunately he doesn’t run very fast, but neither do I. My first thought was, ‘He’s being awful friendly,’ when he came up to me the first time.
“He’s normally friendly. After he came after me again, I thought, ‘Wait, he wants something.’” The groundhog, which McGrath’s grandchildren enjoy looking for when they come to visit, then bared its teeth as it chased McGrath into his house. It didn’t stop there, as McGrath said it the animal began digging at the glass-and-metal door, furiously attempting to bite and claw its way inside. McGrath’s wife Carol suspects the groundhog was sick due to rabies. The animal was always docile when they encountered it previously, and Carol said she often enjoyed its presence because it would eat the weeds on their property.
“We were lucky,” she said of the “crazy” and “freaky” ordeal. “You’re just in a kind of disbelief when something like that happens.” The couple called Hampton Animal Control Officer Peter MacKinnon for help, watching in amazement as the groundhog continued to dig at the door and a corner of leaf-covered dirt next to the front stairs before MacKinnon arrived. The groundhog also tried to attack MacKinnon when he got out of his truck, forcing him to jump back into the vehicle and slam the door before the animal could get inside. MacKinnon used a rifle to kill the animal after he exited his vehicle, and the groundhog’s body will now be tested for rabies.
2 comments:
"...because it would eat the weeds on their property"
That may be the problem. Humans always assume that where they, all of a sudden, build their houses, is their piece of land. They forget that the, in this instance maybe, the groundhog and his ancestors have been there since before the white man came to America.
Why do we think it is our land ?
Do we expect all the animals to go to extinction ?
In reply to WilliamRocket:
There were some early cultures that had no possessive forms in their language, pronouns to be exact. Where an English speaker might say, “I am holding his cup,” these pronoun-free cultures would make sentences that might sound like “the hand is holding the cup.”
What you are quibbling is the use of a pronoun. These pronouns make communicating so much easier. They define relationships in a way that would be difficult if they did not exist.
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