Oh, Mystical Mom (fellow adopter of Clarksburg Quackers) that is so awful! What a caricature of a redneck! A friend of mine the other day was just telling me a tale of a lost emu (this friend had actually seen the Clarksburg Quackers next to the road on the way to work and thought they maybe wandered up from the nearby lake). I don't recall if the story was somebody who tried to catch a found emu or somebody who had lost theirs.
Another friend told me a story of about 50 emus that had escaped in the Washington DC area about ten years ago. The police were called and of course they had no clue how to catch emus. One of the officers started twirling his keychain around as he pondered the scenario and as an emu came up to investigate the shiny object, it was caught. Soon all the cops were twirling their keychains and I understand that all the emus were eventually caught in this manner.
When I was working at a petting farm this fall, some customers inadvertently let an emu out. Without a prayer of actually catching her, we were able to run her into one of the fenced pastures. Her buddies were just on the other side of the fence, so we were gradually able to get her back in with them.
My emu Babs was hand raised and is very tame. She used to run around the yard and would come when I whistled. Now that she's grown up and used to being in the pasture, I'm not sure I would trust her to do that anymore. She and her friend do come for dinner when I call "Emus!"
That emu belongs to somebody and I guess the only hope of that jerk paying for his evil deed is if they step forward. It doesn't seem right that you can just shoot any old animal ("I had to kill it to save it from the road"); if it was a dog there would be a big hue and cry. Unfortunately since they're not native species, they have no federal protection.
