Angry Ganders are Angry

[azurelunatic]

Apropos of horizonchaser's metaquoted gander adventures, which led me to Hyperbole and a Half's "Dinosaur", I was moved to give some sage advice to Allie. (Comments there are moderated, so it may be a while before it shows up.) I reproduce it here for your delectation:

Angry geese are immensely scary. Unless you have a hockey stick. In which case they're silly because they're attacking the hockey stick and oh man, do they go to to town. Unless there are more of them than you have hockey sticks, in which case they're scary again.

My parents kept geese. At first they were adorable and fuzzy and liked to hang out under Dad's beard and nibble his eyelashes. Then they got big and they were still cute, but a lot featherier. Then the goose started laying eggs, and the gander turned into an asshole.

Hockey sticks by the door became a fact of life. I learned a lot of techniques for dealing with angry ganders.

Anything can make a gander angry. If you walk past, he gets pissed off. If you mess with his woman. If you mess with his woman's eggs, you're dead, but he'll only attack you after his woman is done killing you. If the feed bucket displeases him. If the wind is blowing wrong.

I would say, avoid taunting the angry gander, but if a gander's already angry, anything you do short of vanishing on the spot will make him angrier. If you back off, it will make him mad that you don't stay and fight like a man. If you just stand there, he gets mad that you're taunting him. If you advance, he gets good and mad because it's time for a fight.

Ganders fight with their wings, not just their fearsome serrated bills. They hold you in place, grinding you with their beaks, and then they start kicking you with their wings, and attempting to rend you limb from limb, or at least tear your clothes off you.

Never fight a gander while naked. I cannot stress this enough.

If you slide your foot under a gander, then launch him off the top of your foot like you would in a really smooth soccer trick (not kicking, more throwing with your feet) it startles him, and you may have time to run for it before he flies forward and catches up with you.

A gander can't grinch you if his bill is held shut, but he will try and flap. He can't flap at you if you're holding his wings down. He will, always, be able to shit on you. There is a reason they say "loose as a goose", and this is not because geese are adept at yoga. (Some of them might be. They're very good at a particular one-footed posture.)

Our gander took a liking to Mama, and tried to follow her everywhere. Including into her pottery shop. He had to stay outside, where he proceeded to shit all over the porch, and also to chew the temperature indicator off the little pottery kiln. So Mama had to call the manufacturer and order another one -- not the dial, but the metal piece that goes behind the dial and says where 'off', 'low', 'high', and 'incinerate everything' is. They laughed.

Comments

[redbird]

And I'm metaquoting this, though it may start to get self-referential.

[azurelunatic]

There's a certain amount of humor inherent in geese.

[starfish]

Ahahaha. The funniest thing about this post is that it is not, in any way, exaggeration.

Fucking geese, man.

[azurelunatic]

On the plus side, I now know how to tell a friendly/curious goose from an upset goose from an actively hostile goose. Though it's very easy to tell when a goose is actively hostile, due to the grinching and pinching and flapping and trumpeting and screaming with its mouth full as it beats you about the shins with its wings.

[st_aurafina]

Ah, fond memories of heading off to school, and Mum doing the final check: "Got your lunch? Your homework? Your goose stick? Okay, let's go!" And we'd all trek out of the house to the car, bristling with sticks to beat the geese off.

On behalf of my teenage self, who got trapped in a swimming pool by circling geese when Mum took off to the supermarket and left me alone with the monsters, I thank you for this safety message.

[azurelunatic]

Yes. The goose stick is vital to the start of a good day. And oh dear, trapped in a swimming pool surrounded by geese can not have been pleasant.

Offtopic

[foxfirefey]

Aw, I like your icon!

[bedlamsbard]

Here from metaquotes.

See, there's a healthy reason I have a very strong phobia of birds! (Of course, it isn't limited to geese. Pigeons are terrifying. Dirt birds are terrifying. Peacocks are hell on earth.)

[azurelunatic]

I was introduced to close-up birds through chickens, in their benign and peeping form as chicks, so I came to view chickens, and by extension most birds, as something like animate dolls, to have their feet washed and dressed up in doll clothes and cuddled and petted and hand-fed. So I developed a love for chickens like unto my love of cats, and am mostly fearless of most birds. Geese just require a lot more self-defense, a stick, and a working knowledge of exactly how to grab the beak of a stroppy gander. (Their mouth-opening muscles are a lot weaker than their mouth-closing muscles, so it's amazingly easy to hold it closed, which results in a very disgruntled gander but no biting.) Though I wouldn't want to tangle with a swan, ever. Not without at least a ten-foot pole.

I haven't lived on close terms with any peafowl, but I have heard enough from my aunt who has them ... the part I think I would hate most would be the screaming in the middle of the night.

[azurelunatic]

Cae: I am terrified of geese. Trufax.

Cae: Have you read Azz's latest post? I made a whimpering noise when I saw those links.

Sass: have you read the dinosaur link? I suggest you stay away

Cae: ...I did, and then hid under my blanket.

Cae: I live next to a lake.

Azz: The goose in her house actually looked relatively friendly.

Azz: Probably could have been shooed out with a broom.

Cae: ...have you ever dealt with one of those?

Cae: They are evil.

Cae: One chased me as a child and headbutted our car. It left a dent in the car!

Azz: Same breed as the goose we used to have. Gander was a different breed.

Cae: They bite! And scratch. Evil Monsters.

Cae: ><

Azz: That one's body language said that it was pretty chill for a goose in a house.

Cae: I wouldn't trust it. *is traumatized*

Azz: Springtime is coming, the geese are getting laid. Please walk with caution, and a hand grenade. If you haven't got a hand grenade, a great big stick will do; if you haven't got a great big stick, then God help you.

Azz read that somewhere once, and committed it to memory

Sass dies laughing

Cae: I like the ducks. They are calm. And not scary.

Azz: DUCKS ARE FREAKY TWISTED FUCKS.

Sass: ducks are nice

Azz: Ducks are bad mothers. Drakes are abusive fathers. For all the craziness and meanness of the geese, they treated their families right.

Azz: MOTHER DUCKS WANDER OFF AND ABANDON THEIR BABIES.

Azz: FATHER DUCKS BEAT THEIR SONS AND TRY TO RAPE THEIR DAUGHTERS.

Azz: until, of course, Mother Goose comes along and gives Father Duck the beating of his life, with Father Goose standing backup and glaring like all fuckery.

[attie]

I believe there is a species of duck that evolved the ability to avoid conceiving from rape, so common is it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH DUCKS.

[azurelunatic]

Yes, the explosive-expanding-when-deployed curly penis, and the counter-curled cloaca in females. THERE ARE MANY THINGS WRONG WITH DUCKS.

manual pingback

[azurelunatic]

emceeaich: The Goose is not an analogy, the Goose is a bomb.
metaquotes: Useful advice, at least for northerners

[geekgirl]

Geese are effing evil. They took over where I used to work when I moved here. You could smack those buggers with a car door and do more damage to the car than the goose. And chase you, holy crap - in and out of cars!

[azurelunatic]

They move surprisingly fast.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

This is all so true! Satan's own domesticated fowl as my father used to call them! And yet, so tasty ...

[azurelunatic]

That they are! One year we let our goose keep her eggs. There were goslings. There were a lot of goslings. Even when they were nearly the size of their parents, they still tried to sit under their mother, so she was surrounded by this whole heap of geese with only their heads under her wings.

The goslings started to slowly disappear, and the geese were very distraught. We tried to avoid having them actually see Dad heading off into the woods with a gosling, because they are smart and they put cause and effect together. Dad usually would go just out of sight down the hill with chickens, but with the goslings he went way far out, because again, smart geese.

But roast goose is tasty. If greasy.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Oh the poor grieving dears! It's their smartness that makes it all so hard! They are on the border of my list of Animals That Are Too Smart to Eat (dogs, octopuses, cuttlefish ...) and I suspect I only keep them on the acceptable list because of Christmas and extreme nominess.

[azurelunatic]

It was really tough for my dad, who had to do the dirty work. There were No More Goslings after that.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

Secure facilities love to use geese as the perimeter guard animal, especially in flocks.

1) Impossible to bribe or persuade to silence. No bait works, so cannot drug or poison either.

2) Cannot silent kill. (Knife a goose? Maybe. But all twelve? Not so much.). Garotte: are you kidding? Likely to take your own fingers off trying. Too small a target for "Hush Puppy" (silenced .22) or most quiet small arms, including crossbow. (Going full auto, although tempting, Will Get You Noticed.). Even attack dogs, the usual counter to guard animals, will have trouble with more than 1-2 geese and they all know it.

3) Will incessantly hunt down and peck at intruders, tearing clothing, going for weak spots, thus impossible to ignore.

4) Small enough that IR system does not mistake for human.

5) Too stupid to run away or become quiet no matter how many you kill.

6) Alert reliably to intrusion, less often to false noises. "Chatter" assures that all is well, silence means something is wrong. Both cries and chatter are audible from great distances.

7) Bonus: successful slayer must change clothes (from plastic bag) and wipe down if they prevail and want to infiltrate, as otherwise they are covered in all possible goose fluids.

:)

[azurelunatic]

These are all excellent qualifications.

... the mention of "chatter" makes me realize that I can also understand goosey "sweet nothings". Oh dear.

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Back in college I used to keep some pita bread on hand for when I had to walk or bike past the campus goose flock. A couple of quick flings (pita makes for a great frisbee) cleared a path in just a few seconds.

[azurelunatic]

Oh, I bet it just does. Perfectly shaped.