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Title: Witnesses Watch in Horror as Cop Kills Tiny Groundhog for ‘Acting Oddly’ (Cop "feared for his life")
Source:
FromThe Trenches/FTP
URL Source: http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.c ... undhog-for-acting-oddly/225496
Published: May 8, 2018
Author: Matt Agorist
Post Date: 2018-05-09 06:30:34 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 1191
Comments: 12
Free Thought Project – by Matt Agorist Carroll County, MD — A very graphic and hard to watch video has surfaced prompting backlash toward the Carroll County Sheriff’s office in Maryland after it showed one of their deputies shoot and kill a tiny ground hog. According to the department spokesperson, Cpl. Jon Light, the deputy stopped and killed the ground hog because it was ‘acting oddly.’ To be entirely fair, many times animals become rabid and need to be put down as they pose a danger to the public. Many times, police officers are the ones who need to do this as it is often required of their duties. However, according to the department, it was unclear if the groundhog posed such danger as there had been no reports of it biting anyone or if it was rabid. The incident happened on Sunday around 4 p.m. after the deputy stopped traffic in the middle of the highway to deal with the groundhog. Justyna Olkowska witnessed the encounter while driving home from work in Sykesville, and posted a video of it on Facebook that has been viewed over 78,000 times. The video, which has since been censored by Facebook, was posted with the following caption. This just happened. And I’m soooo distraught!!!! Like I cannot believe I just witnessed this. If you’re not an animal lover, you won’t understand my pain… As the video begins, Olkowska was filming and laughing as the groundhog appeared to want to go in the officers direction. However, the laughter quickly turned into horror as the officer took aim and shot it. “You see the groundhog coming after the officer. At this point in time, the animal was not acting as a normal animal would. It is within our policy to dispose of any animal that could pose a health threat,” Light said. Indeed, it does appear that the groundhog was heading toward the officer. However, it is also entirely possible that it had been separated from its offspring—which were possibly located behind the deputy—and was trying to get to them. “It started out as a cute encounter where I thought he was trying to help the little fella,” said Olkowska, who lives in Pikesville. “I obviously did not think that it would take this turn and was kind of shocked. I am sure the officer did the best thing in this situation. It is not for me to judge.” While the Free Thought Project has reported on numerous instances of police officers killing animals, in our many years at it, we’ve never seen a cop kill a groundhog. However, we have seen police officers shooting kittens in front of children. According to the North Ridgeville Police Department in Ohio, the police did nothing wrong when they discharged their weapons a few feet away from children in order to euthanize 5 kittens in 2013. Also, last year, Matt Minnick, a small farmer in Portland, learned the hard way about police killing animals after a Washington County Sheriff’s Office Deputy feared for his life and shot and killed his top breeding goat—an animal that fills petting zoos across the world. In 2015, another Washington County Sheriff’s Office Deputy shot and killed a 30-year-old pony, leaving a family heartbroken. The department was then caught covering up what really happened. Sadly, the list of family pets who’ve met an early demise is far too long. 
Liberty rd. Sykesville Police shooting Grundhogs in a head in broad daylight. Please share. I may be wrong and he might have been doing his job but all I kept thinking was what if my little niece and nephew were in the car with me seeing this..
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#11. To: Deckard (#0)
by Dan Zimmerman We’re not sure, but we think the groundhog crossed the road for the same reason the chicken did. The problem for this one is that he seemed to do it a number of times, interfering with the flow of traffic. Unfortunately for this Maryland rodent, there was a Carroll County sheriff’s deputy there waiting for him on the other side. Maybe the deputy’s more experienced in groundhog behavioral norms that we are, because we’re not sure we could recognize abnormal activity in one of the beasts. But this little guy had been weaving in and out of traffic, so maybe he’d had one too many cocktails before trying to do the responsible thing and walk home. Anyway, the officer had traffic halted, so the groundhog decided to traverse the roadway one more time. [...] Here’s the sheriff’s office’s statement on the matter:
This thread reminded me of another story about another groundhog death and coverup. NYPost, 2014: Zoo in coverup after groundhog dropped by de Blasio dies A week after Hizzoner dropped Staten Island Chuck in front of a crowd of spectators on Feb. 2, the winter-weather prognosticator died of internal injuries — and then the coverup began, The Post has learned. Staten Island Zoo officials went to great lengths to hide the death from the public — and keep secret the fact that “Chuck” was actually “Charlotte,” a female impostor, sources said Wednesday. The stand-in was found dead in her enclosure at the Staten Island Zoo on Feb. 9 — and a necropsy determined she died from “acute internal injuries,” sources said. She had fallen nearly 6 feet when the mayor lost his grip during the Groundhog Day photo op. Sources said her injuries were consistent with a fall. Instead of revealing the sad loss, the zoo — which gets nearly half of its $3.5 million in annual funding from the city — told the staff to keep the mayor’s office in the dark about the animal’s fate. They told only a few zoo supporters — but claimed that the groundhog had died of natural causes. “I was told he died of old age, that he went to that big farm in the sky,” said Assemblyman Matthew Titone (D-SI), who later learned how the animal had died. The zoo also never revealed the biggest secret of all — that the part of Chuck was being played by Charlotte. Chuck was benched because the zoo feared he could bite de Blasio, as he did Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2009. The zoo doesn’t make public that it has stand-in groundhogs to protect the “groundhog brand,” insiders said.. . . There you have it, de Blasio (not his real name) murdered a lady groundhog and they tried to cover it all up. It's the lying that hurts the most. Y'know, there isn't as much groundhog homicide news on any given news day as you might think. It's pretty rare because groundhogs do avoid people by nature. They're rather shy rodents. Most people go a lifetime and never see one outside a zoo.
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestMaryland Deputy Shooting Groundhog Caught on Video by Motorist
thetruthaboutguns.com
May 08, 2018 
The deputy got out of his vehicle to get the groundhog away from the roadway, but the deputy reported that the groundhog was not acting normally.
“The deputy was travelling on Rt 26 in the area of White Rock Road when he observed traffic backing up along the road. He found that the groundhog in question was walking into the roadway, causing vehicles to stop and creating a hazard. He got out of his vehicle to assess, and as he tried to direct the groundhog off of the roadway, he realized that it was not responding as expected for an animal that was not being cornered or trapped. Believing the groundhog to be either sick or injured, the deputy then put the animal down for the public’s safety.”
#12. To: nolu chan, GrandIsland, A Pole, Pinguinite, Deckard (#11)
Mayor Bill de Blasio has groundhog blood on his hands!
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