The Death of a Possum Family (If you are a city slicker and/or squeamish about dead animals, it might be best to skip this story) I saw a photo of a dead possum with a pouch full of babies and it got me to thinking about a project I got involved in when I was young. Most people dont know much about the pesky possum. North Americas only marsupial. Female marsupials carry and nurse their young inside a pouch but the interesting thing about the possum is how small the young are when they are born. The young are born about the size of a honey bee, little blind pink babies with no hair who have to crawl from the birth canal into the pouch, grab a teat and hold on for dear life. The babies that survive this short journey develop for a couple of months tightly clamped to a nipple in the pouch before their eyes open and they venture out to explore the world. Once out, they will usually hold onto mamas back or side and ride along with her wherever she goes. If youve ever seen a mama possum with ten or twelve babies holding onto her back as she walks around then you know that is about the only time a possum can be characterized as cute. So.....one day we caught a mama possum in a live trap and low and behold, she had half a dozen very small babies in her pouch. In those days, my brother Joe and I were tanning hides and mounting small animals in our spare time so we decided to keep the possum in a cage until the babies came out of the pouch and then we would kill them all and mount the mama with the babies on her back. We thought that would be pretty cool, even better then those mounted bullfrogs shooting pool or playing poker that everyone had in those days. While the baby possums were developing in the pouch, we had plenty of time to think about a way to kill them all with the least amount of mess. Killing with a gun or knife is quick and easy if you are just going to eat an animal but when doing taxidermy you have to clean up the blood and sew up the hole you made. After much thought, we decided to gas the whole group of possums so we built a wooden box that was as airtight as we could get it. When the possums were ready, we made sure that Dad was at work and Mom was off to the grocery store and we set our plan in motion. The space heater in the living room was close to a window so we disconnected the heater, clamped a piece of rubber garden hose on the gas spigot and ran the hose out the window and into the box. We turned on the gas, hoping for quick results since we knew that if mom came home and caught us running gas out the window with a garden hose she would kill us and if we still had a little life left when dad got home, he would finish the job. Well, we learned a few things that day, the first thing is that possums dont die easily. Every time we opened the box to see if they were dead, we would let in fresh air and they would come back to life. With one of our younger brothers keeping a lookout for mom we finally left the gas on long enough to kill the whole box of possums. We opened the box and when the smell of natural gas was gone, there was a much worse smell and a big mess in the box. The second thing we learned that day is that when you kill an animal slowly like that, muscles relax and they tend to urinate and defecate all over themselves. We thought about hosing them off but the sight was so awful and the smell was so bad that we just dug a hole in the back yard and buried the whole lot. We never did get the urge again to mount any possums after that ordeal.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:57:35 +0000
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