While walking the Labs tonight I came across this bit of carnage on one of the neighborhood streets. They’re possums, and they’re not playing possum. That’s blood on the mother and one of the litter. I don’t know if they were attacked by one of the neighborhood dogs let out without a lead (which happens often enough) or if they were hit by a car coming down the street too fast. If the latter, then it was one of the kids, as the speed limit is 25 and possums can react and move fast enough to get out of the way.

I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I’ve certainly seen my fair share of run over squirrels through the years I’ve lived in this neighborhood. Regardless of how they met their end there was absolutely no excuse for what happened to them.

One of the reasons for ASL is to motivate me to push for technical reasons to end this kind of carnage, large and small. I have a fantasy that somehow, some way, I can create a means for leaving this planet without dying. Of finding a way to move off-world and build new arks, if you will, for all the living things on this world that simply want to live as they have for millennia.

I hate what we’ve become; a plague upon this world.