I think I've mentioned before that I'm now subscribed to the EDgun Leshiy channel on YouTube, where I can watch a dude shoot squirrels with various air rifles. If you're not okay watching cute little animals get what they deserve for being pests, then I don't recommend this channel to you. To be fair, the guy doing the shooting doesn't revel in his kills, although he will offer commentary about the more dramatic ones.
I'm almost certain I've talked about what happens to the squirrels that get shot. In most cases, they go down with a thud. Sometimes, they bleed out of their wounds; sometimes, they simply tumble off their perch, do a spastic death dance, and that's it. In extreme situations, either they get hit in one of their eyes (which produces a rather dramatic and disgusting splash), or the projectile enters the skull and causes a pressure wave to propagate through the squirrel's brain, resulting in one eye being evulsed (ejected partially or wholly out of its socket).
What I didn't know was that chipmunks apparently have, shall we say, much more fragile skulls. If my buddy Charles is grossed out by the thought of dying squirrels, he'll definitely need to stay away from the chipmunk-blasting videos because... Jesus Christ. The shooter generally uses .177 caliber pellets, but he sometimes ups it to full-on .22 caliber, or even 7.62 mm (.30 cal) rounds. No matter the projectile, the result is the same: exploding chipmunk heads. I'm still watching these videos, but even for me, the relentless cavalcade of erupting skulls can be a bit much. Brains fly all over the place, liberated from their bony little prisons. What final, fractured thoughts must be going through those chipmunks' rapidly expanding minds? I can only imagine. Luckily, the whole thing is over in milliseconds, but for me, the image of each shattered, splattered cranium is etched into my consciousness.
And for that reason, instead of embedding, I'm providing only a link to the most recent chipmunk video. Don't click if you're not ready. Seriously—don't.
I'm not grossed out, necessarily, and I don't have a problem with pests being killed. I just don't see the point of spending time watching it. I also don't generally like super-violent films. (I say "generally" because I watched all of the John Wick films, and those are pretty violent, but the violence is rather stylized for all its brutality. What can I say? I am a bundle of contradictions.)
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of the turn of phrase in that one comment you'd made—the one where you said "blown to bits." Nothing that dramatic was happening in the squirrel videos. The chipmunk vids, by contrast, have turned out to be pretty gory. The video I linked to here isn't even the worst one.
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