Die Turtle, Die!

My grandfather hated turtles. I'm not just talking about the intense but generally diffuse dislike of tomatoes and baseball like I have, but an intense murderous hatred of the hard-shelled reptiles. I'm not exactly sure what the cause of his hatred was. I think he may have thought that the turtles ate the catfish that he stocked in his fish pond, but we're not talking alligator snapping turtles here. We're talking the normal little pond turtles you see sunning themselves on logs at any pond or swamp.

He was known to take potshots at them when he saw them and even went so far as to have my dad install a floating turtle trap in his pond. My dad paddled out in the little inflatable boat we had bought him as a gag gift the Christmas before and anchored the big PVC pipe and net construction in the middle of the pond. My dad checked it a few times but it never seemed to have any turtles trapped inside. It actually is still floating back there in the pond twenty years later, grass and weeds eking out a tenacious existence in the grime that has built up in the crevices on top of the device and the turtles love it. It's the perfect place to come out and sun, safely removed from the shore of the pond. It probably really pissed granddaddy off that he gave such a wonderful gift to his much despised nemeses.

My dad, on the other hand, loathes ladybugs. He's convinced they're the ones eating the leaves of his bean plants every year. I once even showed him an article on ladybugs that talked about how they actually eat the herbivorous pests and are used in organic farming as pest control, but that knowledge didn't seem to stick. He still curses and crushes them every chance he gets.

Oddly, these two men were and are unusually rational and open minded for their eras and geography when it came to racial issues. I guess they saved all of their bigotry for the wildlife. I do have to admit that I sometimes get the urge to take out my shotgun and bust a cap some turtle ass just for old times sake, though.