Sunday, March 22, 2009

Feet are food too

It was strange to find one rotting coon foot, with no carcass or other coon bits to be found, but to find another lone foot a half a mile away and several days later - what luck (in Rosie's opinion)! I didn't have the balls to retrieve the first coon foot from between Rosie's molars, especially as I would have had to carry it a good ways until I found a tree or suitable bush. It was much too squishy and horrible feeling for that amount of contact, and I thought it'd be better disposed of by a labrador. Although a lab's digestion is amazing - Lily's stomach stripped the foot of fur and thouroughly mangled it - it none-the-less rejected this particular foot as uneatable and sent it back up, new and improved with a powerful and untique odor. After dealing with the first, I thought I'd rather not see or smell the second foot after Rosie was done with it. I grabbed it by it's protruding tibia, wiggled it out of Rosie's jaws, and hung it in a scrub oak.

My only guess is that this particular raccoon's feet were just too repulsive to be consumed with the rest of the carcass, though god knows how they got so widely distributed across the landscape. Perhaps some bird attempted to carry the feet off, and then caught a whiff and dropped them mid-flight. Point being, this proves that of all scavengers, there is no palate less discriminating than that of a labrador retriever.

1 comment:

amy said...

spoken like a true labrador owner! M