I went outside this morning and raccoons had gotten into our garbage again. I'm pretty sure that raccoons are smarter than humans, since they've managed to outwit our tight-sealing garbage cans and use our swimming pools to wash off their food, while most Americans can't find their own state on a map. One early morning a couple of summers ago I awoke in the middle of the night to an awful screeching noise outside my window. After convincing myself that the world was not ending and we were not being burglarized by banshees, I peeked out the window and saw two raccoons hissing and fighting with each other. I banged on the window to scare them, but they turned and hissed at me which scared the crap out of me, so I abandoned my attempts and grudgingly accepted my position below the raccoons in species supremacy.

Florida is also one of the only states in the union where you can see live armadillos. Most armadillos choose long stretches of highway as their natural habitat and therefore occur most often in nature as roadkill. This affinity for the automobile culture explains why I came back late one night and an armadillo actually followed my car into the garage. I thought this was the coolest thing ever and tried to corner it in the back of the garage, but my parents had other ideas and either screamed (my Mom) or chased it with a broom (my Dad) until it returned to the roadway, most likely to be struck down soon after.

The all time greatest Florida animal story, however, occurred last winter. During Thanksgiving break, a lot of fuss was made by the locals when a very large wild turkey decided to take residence in the front yard of a house down the street from me. "Ha ha, it's a turkey on Thanksgiving!," they cleverly noted. But the holiday came and went and the turkey stayed. I would drive past the house multiple times a day and it would always be there, sometimes coexisting nicely with the kids who lived in the house. Obviously the kids had been feeding the turkey, which is more effective than an electric fence for making sure animals never leave the premises. Then, the unthinkable (and inevitable) happened. The turkey, no longer fearing humans, made like an armadillo and strayed too close to the road and was struck and killed by a car.

Normally this would be the end of the story, but the tire tracks from the offending vehicle veered way off the road into the yard, and this was more than enough to evoke the suspicion of foul play. The local television stations did multiple stories on the turkey, ranging from heartrending (showing the young girl playing in the yard with the turkey and their "favorite toy, the oven mitt" as well as the turkey sleeping on the roof of the house) to criminal (interviews with neighbors who claimed to see a white car driven by a teenager swerve off the road and hit the animal). This went on for a few days.

In Stuart, Florida, much like St. Louis, there are many crimes that occur everyday that go unsolved. Houses are vandalized, stores are robbed, people are murdered in the seedier parts of town, and the offenders manage to evade capture because, despite advances in forensics, the police just aren't equipped to handle motiveless crimes. This being said, you can probably guess that the turkey-killing culprit was caught in three days. Normally it takes longer than that for the police just to get to the scene of the crime and look for evidence, but for an important case like this and with great evidence (everyone in this entire state drives a white or beige car) the coppers mobilized themselves quickly.

The culprit, being a first-time offender, was fined and sentenced to a bunch of community service. So let this be a lesson to you criminal-types who come down to Florida to put a hit on someone: make sure you don't kill any pets. Because while murdering innocent people is just a sign of the downward spiral of American culture, killing animals is inhumane.