Adventures in Nutria Land

Last night, one of my dogs, Mazzy caught a nutria. Again. In case you are unaware of what exactly a nutria is check this out.

This time, it was I that was in the back yard with the dogs. Mazzy caught it trying to be sneaky and hide in the blackberry bushes, but she was having none of that. I don't know how she does it, when the other dogs just walk on by not realizing that there is a giant rat in the shrubbery, she just hones right in. She seems to just chomp down on it, breaking it's back then squeezes until it stops breathing.

This one was so huge that she had to drag it out of the blackberries to show me, instead of carrying it. Of course she dropped it before it was totally dead. I was unaware of that when I went to go look at it.

I had gone in the house to get a flashlight to "check it out", and after shining the light on it, it started hopping around but only moving the rear of it's body. Apparently Mazzy had given it injuries that paralyzed the front half of it's body and not the back, so it was jumping and trying to run using only it's hind feet. But sadly the resulting effect was just to continuously slam it's own face into the ground. I, uh went in the house after that. Shall I say, icky?

I called my husband at work to let him know that there was a half-dead-injured-possibly-paralyzed-giant nutria dragging itself around the back yard and could he please dispose of it when he gets home. (The usual "disposing" is picking it up with a shovel and catapulting it into the empty but blackberry over- grown lot behind our yard.) Of course he had to repeat back to me everything I said in his not so sneaky way of sharing with his co-workers the goings on of our house hold, so they can get a chuckle at our wild life.

So last night when he got home, he grabbed my son, the flashlight and the shovel to do the deed. With my son holding the flashlight, my husband examined the now dead body. He announced that "yup, it's in full rigor". What is this, CSI? Just fling it over the fence for shit's sake! I was half expecting him to whip out a thermometer thingee and take it's liver temp to determine time of death. Jeez.

Well, apparently things can't go smoothly in my household. Husband went to shovel it up and he realized he might want to get a bigger shovel. Perhaps a snow shovel if we owned one? Oh well, so with a third of the corpse hanging over on either side of the shovel, my big, strong husband flung with all his might. The body hit an almost solid wall of blackberries approximately ten feet up and rolled back down. EWWW! He makes another Herculean attempt, but to no avail, it rolled down once again. By then he was cussing and swearing that the thing weighed at least 50 lbs. (I don't know if you looked at the link above, but I think the max weight is 20 lbs. but what do I know?)

So here is something interesting that capped off the night. We have a fence that we put up to reinforce an old one. The old one and the new one are six inches from each other parallel and made out of wire. Some how on his third attempt, with my son laughing his head off, my dear sweet husband hurled the dead, giant rodent and it hit the slightly taller rear wire fence, rolled down and is now currently stuck between the the rear fence and the new fence. And it's not coming out. Its like a bug stuck between two microscope slides. But way more gross. I love my husband. Sigh.

So in the mean time I found something amusing. To me anyway. And this is only part one. More to come. If you like B movie flicks, I think you'll like this. And it was filmed in Oregon.