Duck Hunting!

“You hand in your ticket, and go watch the geek, who immediately walks up to you when he hears you speak, and says, ‘How does it feel to be such a freak?’
And you say, ‘Impossible’ as he hands you a bone."

Bob Dylan “Ballad of a Thin Man”

One of our favourite sections of The Shark Book comprised tales involving alcohol and animals (in the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom rather than the John Belushi/ National Lampoon sense of the word) – a sure bet when it comes to hilarity as anyone who has ever been bored with nothing but a house-pet and a 24 to entertain themselves with will know. This section entitled “You Animal” chronicles animals with alcoholic tendencies – among them “Bongo”, the NYC chimp who raided his family’s liquor cabinet and went on a wild, destructive bender that ended in the biting of an interfering human’s toe – and also daring drunks who challenged mother nature while drunk and found out that mother nature can be, well, a mother.

Recently we’ve been following a story (full story here) that could have fit among the latter, though unfortunately in this case the disturbed drunkard had all the odds. He committed an act that one would have hoped had went the way of the pay-a-dime-and-glimpse-the-freak circuses of the past – geeking, which has nothing to do with this, but rather refers to the act of biting the head off an animal, usually a live chicken (though it is said a snake will do in a pinch), in public (Alan Prendergast, from the “Latest Word” blog, found quite a telling description of what it takes to “get a man to geek” from a 40s noir novel here).

In this case , it was a duck, one of many that a hotel in Minnesota had purchased as mascots to fill their lobby (the bird is pretty popular in the land of 10,000 lakes and immeasurably more hunters once duck season begins). The man in question, who in a nice twist was a visiting health auditor from Colorado traveling on the taxpayer’s dime, arrived at the hotel drunk in the wee small hours and proceeded to chase down the duck (one of a crew of “domesticated ducks” that the hotel had brought in for $400 a head), trap it in a corner and, in an unexpected finale, tear its head off.

As other customers and hotel staff looked at him in shock and revulsion the man explained, “I’m hungry, I’m gonna eat it”. Now, while both of us can attest to the fact that duck, particularly when prepared with just the right sauce, is rather toothsome, the man’s explanation points to alcohol’s tendency to push one toward the irrational. It is unlikely that the hotel, where the duck was later referred to as “part of the family”, would have prepared it for him in the kitchen, and it is unlikely indeed that the man’s room had any means by which he could properly cook such demanding fare.

Arrested for his actions, the man who, weirdly, already has a record for wrongful duck death, couldn’t figure out what he’d done wrong. “Big deal, it's just a *sensitive eyes spared an expletive* duck,” he said. The auditor was freed on $10,000 bail (!), put on administrative leave and now faces charges in duck-loving Minnesota of animal cruelty, which, given the potential jury pool and his “devil may care about our wetlands friends” attitude, could mean a big headache down the road.