LET THE BUCKET GO

/ janpriddyoregon

This is not my day to post, but today, just now, a frighting event.

That is a young bull Roosevelt elk on the sand, what is called locally a spike because he has his first antlers. The orange object to person’s left (your right) is a bucket belonging to the woman. The elk is interested in that bucket. Whether she was aware of it or not, she challenged that elk. The person is texting and taking photos. Do I need to explain that getting this close to an elk, even one that is on the low end of 700 to 1100 pounds, is what we would call “dangerous.” Stupid comes to mind.
You might be able to tell that I took these photos from inside my house. That person hung around and hung around, apparently because she was keen on retrieving her bucket. The elk did poke at it, bounce around, and it was a few minutes before he noticed that the woman had finally (finally!) decided to back away. The elk followed her. Five or ten minutes. We feared it would go badly for the woman, and that would make things go badly for the elk too, even though it would be entirely her fault.
The elk walked up into the basalt, and you can see the person never did leave the beach. We saw her fall twice in the rocks. She’s sitting, waiting her chance to retrieve her bucket. Seriously? The elk eventually walked up a path and off the beach. We watched until everyone was safe. We did not call out to anyone. That would likely have resulted in a dead elk. The person went out and retrieved her orange bucket. I ask you, a bucket? We’re supposed to be smart animals, we people. We didn’t see how it all started, but the progress of this event didn’t make the person look good in the situation. She seemed too intent on retrieving that bucket.

We were afraid for the person, of course, but also afraid for the animal. We’ve observed people do incredibly stupid things regarding wild animals. At a lodge way up the Columbia River, the house manager told us that people were always trying to pet the local deer. Periodically, a doe would allow people to get to close and this predictably led to an injury of a person and that doe being shot. It had happened more than once over the years.

Locally, a herd of people stood at the surf line and blocked a deer that had been bathing in the surf from leaving the water. Those city-people were so worried about that doe they nearly killed her.

A neighbor was furious about the raccoons coming to her door every night. She fed her dog on her porch.

I once ran out to the beach to stop a woman approaching a juvenile bald eagle she thought she needed to “help”. The bird had been deliberately landed on the beach, something we used to see each summer as parents taught their full-size children how to take off from the flat. The parents were watching.

People look at adorable babies in Pinterest and Facebook and exclaim, “I want one of those.” No you don’t.

In one of my favorite childhood books, Summer of the Falcon by Jean Craighead George, an adolescent girl in a falconer family trains and hunts with a sparrow hawk. Her father warns her against making the bird a pet. For three summers she hunts the bird, and then…

I am so sorry for animals’ suffering. I’m not one of those people with sentimental notions about animals. I see the cute baby anomaly pictures and I don’t want to bring them into my over-heated home or attempt to explain what they are thinking. Wild animals interacting with people generally goes badly for wild animals.

A few autumns ago (two? three years?) the State allowed the shooting of dozens of elk in Gearhart, Oregon (over 75 cow elk, I’m told). The local elk herd used to avoid people but had completely overcome fear and even shyness of human beings. They didn’t avoid people, but walked down the middle of streets. People fed them. Those elk weighed hundreds of pounds and are wild. However much human beings want to ascribe human thoughts, emotions, and motivations to animals, we get it wrong. We get it wrong about actual pet dogs and cats. We do worse when we try to “understand” a wild animal. Animals don’t generally observe, think, reason, or react the way a human would. You’re dreaming if you think you understand them.

Leave wild animals alone. Attempting to treat a wild animal as a pet never goes well for the animal. Read Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is both funny and tragic. Those stories of people making pets of wild animals, if truthful, are always sad at the end. Didn’t you read The Yearling as a kid? Wild animals lead richer, shorter lives. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.* Attempted domestication leads to misery for the animal. Every. Damned. Time.

That stupid woman is walking north with her bucket as I type this post. The story she tells will be ridiculous and inaccurate.

* Gary would make an exception for an injured animal that can no longer survive in the wild—the eagle with a broken wing, for example.

12 thoughts on “LET THE BUCKET GO”

  2. I agree with you, call and complain about an Elk, it will be eliminated. A week ago I found an injured bush rabbit and took it to the wildlife center. They euthanized it and told me it was in shock. It wasn’t when I placed it in the box. I wish I had been skilled to rehab it myself. That Elk is getting used to people. We saw it yesterday and today.

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    • We’ve rescued birds because Gary had pigeons as a boy and is confident about what to do. Most often wild birds in bad enough shape to allow you to touch them are already dying. Most often, the most we’ll do, if we do anything, is to move the bird out of plain sight and the wind. Of the birds we actually “rescued,” the grebe was likely euthanized by the time we left the bird sanctuary, but the rhinoceros auklet was an accomplishment. I rescued a hummer once and it lived, but I didn’t have it long.

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  3. That same elk was eating salal next to our house two nights ago. This morning I was out feeding the birds walking down our driveway tossing some seeds – looking down where the seed was going. I heard something walking on the gravel in the street and when I looked up there was that elk slowly walking away from me. He did not seem interested in me and I wasn’t dangerously close, but had I known he was there I would not have gotten as close as I did. The woman on the beach should have moved away – it is not good for the elk to get accustomed to people and they do have the potential to easily hurt people – with poor outcome for both the person and the elk if that happens.

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  5. I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it—stupid stupid stupid—it could have been worse—it could have been two elk and they do appear larger on the windscreen

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  6. This brings to mind Molly Gloss’ story “The Doe.” Another example of what happens when wild animals meet man (as was the Stafford poem that inspired Gloss’ story).

    Jean M

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  7. I don’t know why I appeared anonymous on my two posts above. This is Mary Jo. I am using my phone to post and am getting used to face recognition or passkeys or using my Google account, all which do not require a username or password after initial setup. All three do not seem to appear for WordPress.

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