Posted on 04/15/2010 11:28:08 AM PDT by JoeProBono
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.- A Florida couple have been charged with theft for capturing ducks from a community lake and arranging to have them killed at an animal shelter.
Robert and Blain Aymond infuriated their Frenchman's Landing subdivision neighbors in Palm Beach Gardens, who showed up at a preliminary hearing en masse last month wearing yellow ribbons with pictures of ducks, The Palm Beach Post reported.
One woman, Lorraine Lyon, tried to bring the ducks's ashes to the hearing but was unable to get them past security.
While critics call the Aymonds duck-killers, their lawyer, Mitchell Beers, said there is another side to the story. The couple raise orchids and were tired of duck droppings on their plants. They thought they had a right to get rid of ducks on their property, he added.
"It's getting out of hand," Beers said. "They're sending pictures of ducks to the judge, putting signs up saying that my clients murdered the ducks."
The Aymonds herded eight ducks onto their patio and then arranged for a trapper to take them to the shelter. They are scheduled to go on trial next month on a misdemeanor charge of stealing ducks valued at $280.
AFLAC in disguise?
Duck droppings can cause something called histoplasmosis, which can cause blindness. If the ducks were a problem, the people had a right to get rid of them. The other alternative would be to shoot off a starting gun every ten minutes until the ducks left the area. How would the neighbors have reacted to that?
Shoot the duck! Twice if necessary.
They just busted a couple of Navy pilots from here that were shooting ducks in Fla. They had more than a few...
great story and labs are the best...just doing what she was bred to do and having fun doing it.......
Pheasant is much nicer. We had a training day setup with a blind (sort of hide-and-seek for Labs -- teaching them to 'handle' by whistle and hand signal to a hidden bird). The dogs get in line and take turns to run the series. The blind was planted with 4-5 mallard ducks and one hen pheasant.
Every time Shelley came up and ran the blind, she came back with the pheasant. It was the first time she had encountered one, and she was charmed. She didn't want to give it back, and was so insistent about it that the flight manager gave her the bird to take home at the end of the day. We put it in the freezer and took it out for her to retrieve periodically until it just couldn't be thawed one more time. She looked longingly at the garbage can until the garbagemen came and took it away.
I may have to get her one for a pet.
I don’t have a problem with the killing of the ducks period. I’m not sure why you think I did. While I like animals (go check out my flickr pages and you will see that I spend large amounts of my spare time taking photos of creatures both wild and domestic) I also know that they can be a problem on your property. Unless they belong to someone (and are on their own property or there are extenuating circumstances) or are endangered, I think people have a right to remove them from their property, even to the point of killing them. I certainly don’t like cruelty (the post upthread about removing the bills of some ducks certainly qualifies as cruelty—what sort of person does something like that??). However, there are gray areas there. I think rodeos are fine, some people find them cruel. I think hunting is fine, but I’m sure there is some suffering there (and I am positive there is lots of suffering in nature).
So, no, I don’t have a problem with the people killing the ducks that were on their property.
The article is terrible, but just from living down here, I suspect the ducks are volunteers, that is they don’t belong to anyone but they found a lake and decided to live there. They are all over the place here.
I would certainly get them off my property one way or the other. Ducks are nasty creatures as are pigeons and I don't want either of them pooping on my yard or my house.
We had a house on Galveston Bay and the pigeons were roosting on our roof and nesting in our boat shed and it was horrible. I finally got them to move to someone elses house by squirting them with the hose as much as I could. There were some domestic ducks that wandered around but they didn't impact us.
It’s sad, birds are dirty, altho I enjoy them. I have discovered that lizards are also dirty (living down here in S. FL). My golden is hell on them, she is obsessed with them. Fortunately for the lizards she is rarely outside long enough to catch them. I love to take their photos, but most of the ones we have are not native anyway.
We are HUGE bird watchers. We have had Indigo Buntings in the yard this week along with all of the usual ones. I have 3 feeders out all the time and from Jan until now I have 3 socks with thistle for the Gold Finches that winter here. I don’t find songbirds particularly dirty, nothing like pigeons and ducks.
I have only once seen an indigo bunting. We have lots of interesting birds here (S.FL) but mostly they are wading birds.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sundero/sets/72157605454001379/
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