Posted on 11/01/2006 10:55:11 AM PST by dirtboy
OIL CITY, Pa. - Letter carriers occasionally have to deal with angry dogs or maybe even a spider's nest in a mailbox, but a mean squirrel?
Barb Dougherty, a 30-year Postal Service employee, said she was attacked and bitten Monday by a squirrel while delivering mail in Oil City, about 75 miles north of Pittsburgh.
"It was a freak thing. It was traumatic," Dougherty told The Derrick in Oil City. "I saw it there on the porch, put the mail in the box and turned to walk away and it jumped on me."
The animal ran up her leg and onto her back, she said.
"I eventually got a hold of the tail and pulled it off me," Dougherty said. "No one was home at the house where I was delivering the mail, but the neighbor lady heard me screaming and came over."
An ambulance took Dougherty to the hospital, where she was treated for cuts and scratches. The squirrel was killed with a BB gun and sent to a lab to be tested for rabies. Dougherty was given the first series of rabies shots as a precaution.
Postal officials said the attack is extraordinary.
"In about 230 years of postal history, I bet it is not the first, but I've personally never heard of another squirrel biting," said Steve Kochersperger, spokesman for the Erie district.
Squirrels do not frequently bite people, said Regis Senko, who works for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
Steve Jolley, a Postal Service manager in Oil City, said, "We are not issuing a squirrel alert, but everyone is aware of the incident."
How do you import cool picture to FR response?
Dang, mixing Bud and Old Style? That would make any mammal foam at the mouth.
The squirrel was the very uncommon omnivore beaver hunter variety.
A "Tree rat acts squirrely, goes postal" ping.
We are not issuing a squirrel alert...
Your kind of thread!
Simple http:
Find the url for the picture you want to post, then
img src="http://www.[website].com/images/[name of image.gif"
only enclose it in angle brackets
HTML Bootcamp (or Wow, how did they do that?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a1e6b7134bf.htm
When I was a kid in Brooklyn, a squirrel jumped out of a tree onto my friends dads back. Messed him up pretty bad.
For the next week, people were hunting squirrels and bringing the corpses in for rabies testing.
ping
It would have to be a hot BB gun. A pellet gun, .177 will do the job.
I went to Ohio State, a pedestrian campus where people routinely feed squirrels. They had so little fear that they would actually steal food out of bookbags and even people's hands if you were distracted.
One free bite? Not. Rabbits are far more dangerous.
He was looking for nuts?
"I was wondering what was the suitable caliber for squirrel."
.44 Magnum works well, too. The cleanup's a lot easier with the BB gun though.
Where do you live verum? In Florida we're always fighting off some critter from raiding our cart. Birds, squirrels, and last month we had a raccoon tip-toeing up until we noticed it. I threw him a cracker, which is probably the wrong thing to do, but he left us alone. You do NOT want to screw with one of those magnificent bastards! Oops. Last comment mixed up with another post regarding Rove.
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