Hometown in National News!

Yesterday I turned on the tv to "The Today Show" for a minute while I changed Rhett but I wasn't really watching because I was talking to the girls too and then I heard them wrap up the segment saying, "Reporting from Zanesville, Ohio..." WHAT??? That's where I grew up since 5th grade and my parents still live there! Almost nobody knows about Zanesville, but not any more! I was glued to the tv trying to figure out why, but had to look on the internet for the grizzly details (couldn't resist). Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

I think this is the most fitting sort of news to come from where I live, for some reason, it just doesn't surprise me. The fact that someone had all these exotic animals, the fact that it was somehow legal, the fact that he let them all go as a suspected revenge on his wife that just told him she was leaving her for another man and loved the animals (or so the town gossip goes). And then the killing of the animals. I think it's sad that they had to go out and shoot all those innocent animals, but where I come from--Zanesville--shooting animals is just a way of life. If we had raccoons or possums in the garage ripping off the cat food, my dad would grab his gun and send them to another world (I even had to hold the flashlight for him once when it was dark to go get him, not my favorite experience). The first day of deer hunting season all schools are out since they know everyone will skip anyway.

So when the sheriff decided to shoot to kill the animals, I doubt there was much arguing, this was probably a dream come true for some of those country boys, a night time safari hunt! I mean, you pretty much can't do that anywhere any more. I think it was the right thing to do because it's rural enough in most areas that those animals could have spread out and hid pretty well, so I'm glad they took care of it right away. Don't get me wrong, I feel bad for the animals, I love animals--when they're not taking care of their business on my lawn--but I'm not attached to these animals like a pet. I'm just saying, I doubt they were crying about it. Sad thing is the sheriff is getting death threats by animal activists now which is really absurd, not a lot of rational thinking going on.

Here is an excerpt from our local paper there that I thought was funny since about 50% of my friends homes had deer heads up on their walls:

Lutz is not sure what they planned to do with the body, but the sheriff's office has received several calls and emails from people wondering if they could get bodies for taxidermy, he said.

"Hey, they're exotic animals," Lutz said. "We know what we had to shoot. There's a lot of people that would pay a lot of money for these animals."

And when we were showing our horses at the county fair years ago, some nimrod flew his little plane right over the show ring several times spooking all the horses which caused the horse my sister was riding to buck her off--3xs in a row--at which point she left the ring. He kept doing it--and my mom just emailed saying that was Terry! We wondered why on earth he was doing it and now we're still wondering why on earth he did so many things.

My brother in law apparently did some odd jobs for the guy when he was younger and one day he answered the door wearing a guitar. That's it. And that's how we'll end this.

There's no place like home!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4rnchDmGMU