Why are possums so hard to kill?!?!

[Alexandra33]

Agree with the above. A head shot seems to be the quickest form of death. Painless as possible.

I am going to scare you all. We are making a den and setting out water for our "pet" opossum that lives in the barn.

Any chances it'll eventually be promoted to house pet?

~Alex

 

[centrarchid]

Agree with the above. A head shot seems to be the quickest form of death. Painless as possible.

Any chances it'll eventually be promoted to house pet?

~Alex

No. It will just suffer the indignity of being looked at once in a while once baby making starts.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Somewhere in the recesses of this old brain , I too thought it had something to do with a very primitive nervous system. "Even pest animals deserve a clean death" - I am in complete agreement with this.

Be it a clean death or not, some pest animals are more deserving of death than others.

 

[Trish1974]

I am going to scare you all. We are making a den and setting out water for our "pet" opossum that lives in the barn.

We had a "pet" possum that used to live in our barn when I was a kid. It would eat cat food with the cats every evening. The cats nor the possum seemed to care about each other.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

I am going to scare you all. We are... setting out water for our "pet" opossum that lives in the barn.

Do get him or her a personal flotation device. The last possum I trapped tried to drink all the water in the horse trough and it didn't end well for old Pogo.

 

[llombardo]

Be it a clean death or not, some pest animals are more deserving of death than others.

I may have woke up on the wrong side of the bed but there is nothing right about this statement.

These "pest" animals are doing nothing more then trying to survive in a world that is full of humans that took over.

We have houses, condos and shopping centers built on land that was once their home, it's not enough that we took that away, so the deserve to die?

No animal, pest or not deserves to die. We have the knowledge and means to learn to live around them, they sadly do not.

I understand this is a chicken forum and people love their chickens(I know I do) but if we can not protect our chickens and have to kill animals then maybe chickens are not the right animal to have.

This is the problem in today's world. No respect for life, everything is disposable. No one educates themselves before they do things, then they wonder what or why something went wrong.

If you have a small dog and you have coyotes or Hawks--you do not leave your dog unattended. If you have a cat and have coyotes or Hawks or fox, you keep the cat inside. If you have chickens and have any predators, you have a secure coop. If you choose to free range, that choice is yours. Any hungry animal that hunts for food will take the opportunity. They are much like human hunters, if a hunter sees that deer, are they going to shoot it? Yes they are because they don't know when the next opportunity will come along. The only difference in these hunters is that these pest animals do it for survival and humans do it because they enjoy it. Humans have the choice, animals do not.

These animals are not meaning to be pest. There was someone that posted on here and I believe they were and followed the Native American Indian way of doing things and it works for them. I am not of that decent, but should be because nature and everything in it is very important and here for a reason.

 

[Callender Girl]

I accidentally had a "pet" possum last winter. I had been feeding a feral cat in one of the hay shelters; Cheddars, a big orange cat, seemed to have a vigorous appetite. All the cat food was always gone the next day. One day, I went to dump the cat food and a "smiling" possum greeted me from atop a hay bale.

The possum showed no interest in any of my birds (why hunt when your food is being served in the comfort of a warm shed?). and when something finally killed "Smiley," I buried it behind a little shed. (As I saw him near the carcass, I suspect Cheddars finally got tired of sharing meals).

Predators play an important role in the ecosystem, and I only dispatch them when I have exhausted all reasonable options. Aldo Leopold, who changed his mind about the value of wolves, is my hero.

 

[cmom]

I have a possum that regularly has been visiting our barn. I had some rat baits in bait boxes and it destroyed a couple of the bait boxes to get the bait. I thought the rat bait would kill it but night after night it would come back. I did some research and according to my research possums are immune to rat bait and it doesn't affect them.

 

[aart]

The possum started like twitching and rolling around? It's most likely dead right??? I thought it was dead the first time :l but

How did you 'kill' it?

 

[cmom]

As far as poisons go possums have an immunity according to my research. A possum here ate a whole package of rat poison. I have it on camera. I thought it would die from it, but to my surprise it kept coming back.