Fun_People Archive
22 Apr
More gang violence

Date: Fri, 22 Apr 94 00:02:57 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: More gang violence

Forwarded-by: joeha@microsoft.com
From: WhiteBoard News for April 21, 1994
This item comes from Jim Anderson:

Iron Mountain, Michigan:

A gang of turkeys went for state troopers after causing a
fender bender, forcing police to use pepper spray to break
them up.

Two cars were forced to stop Friday to avoid the flock that
was blocking a road near Iron Mountain in the state's Upper
Peninsula.  A third car ran into the rear of one of the
stopped cars, state police said.

As Trooper Daryl Middleton spoke with a driver about the
accident, five or six of the birds were "yelping, clucking
and gobbling at him as they moved towards him in an
intimidating manner," state police said in a news release.

It got worse when Trooper Larry Gasperich started directing
traffic around the cars.  The birds converged on him, then
became even more agitated when Gasperich swatted them with
his hat.

That was when he whipped out his Macelike pepper spray and
let loose.

"The suspects fled the scene on foot, running down the hill
and into a wooded area south of the crime scene," police said.


[The alert fun_person will, I hope, recognize that this little tidbit is not of
interest merely because of the cute references in the last paragraph but also
because of the violence done by the opening "A gang of turkeys ..." when
everybody knows (or could know) that the appropriate term of venery is "A
rafter of turkeys" (rafter derives from raft and raff, as in raffish and
riffraff).  If you want a gang, look for elk (or humans).  -psl]

© 1994 Peter Langston