Could You at Least Knock or Something

I guess the police are no longer satisfied with merely shooting dogs, they’ve not moved on to deer:

When Jeff Carpenter heard gunfire outside his rural Forest Lake residence before sunrise Saturday morning, he raced outside to find a man holding a shotgun.

“I was just glad I didn’t go out there with my gun. This thing could have got deadly,” said Carpenter, who had been burglarized recently and at first didn’t realize that he was looking at a city police officer.

On the ground nearby, Carpenter said, were two fawns that he and his wife, LeeAnn, had been feeding.

Perhaps the police should have knocked on the man’s door before slaughtering his deer. I’m sorry but if I hear gunfire going on outside of my fucking home on my fucking property I’m going to be a bit on edge. Me on edge with my LR-308 is not something you want to see. In fact the police put themselves in a horrendously dangerous situation by pulling such a boneheaded maneuver.

So why did the police show up and start firing guns on private property without so much as giving the courtesy of an announcement? Well the deer had collars:

But to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR), they were a potential danger. For weeks, the agency had been receiving reports of two deer with colorful collars — one pink, one orange — running in the vicinity of North Shore Trail near Forest Lake’s border with Scandia in northern Washington County.

“To have somebody put a collar on a wild deer, two of them in fact, I’ve never heard of it,” said Capt. Greg Salo of the DNR’s enforcement division.

My head hurts from slamming it against my desk. I was also unaware of the fact that the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had powers similar to our president, they can order the execution of wild animals:

The DNR, thinking the deer were escapees from a private game farm and could introduce disease among wild deer, ordered a hit on them. The agency notified Forest Lake police in early January that the deer must be shot on sight, Salo said.

The lesson to take away from this story is don’t put collars on deer. By doing so the deer were essentially made targets for police officer with guns who don’t even announce the fact that they’re shooting animals on private property.