Female Cops Tries To Handle A Rabid Groundhog By Herself And Boy Is It Painful To Watch

A female police officer decided she was going to handle a suspected rabid groundhog situation the old-fashioned way. What followed was 42 seconds of the most generous display of marksmanship since someone last tried to hit a piñata while wearing a blindfold.

The scene is a fenced-in field that looks like it belongs to a rec league soccer complex. Officer Lady stands on one side of the chain-link fence. The groundhog, already looking like it had a rough night, is on the other. She lines up the shot. First trigger pull. The dirt next to the animal explodes. The groundhog does a little flop and keeps moving.

She fires again. Then again. The animal is now doing that pathetic injured-animal crawl that makes everyone watching feel a little worse about themselves. The officer keeps walking along the fence line like she’s pacing off a football field, gun out, popping off rounds that keep landing everywhere except the intended target.

By the time the clip ends, the groundhog is still twitching and dragging itself across the grass. The officer has the look of someone who just realized the qualifying score at the range might have been a little generous that day.

The internet immediately split into two camps: the “that thing probably has rabies and needs to go” camp, and the “sweet Jesus just let animal control handle it” camp. Both sides are technically correct. Rabies is no joke. Neither is watching a trained professional turn a 10-yard shot into a 12-round conversation.

Some people are calling it animal cruelty. Others are calling it Tuesday. The only thing everyone agrees on is that if this groundhog had been a human suspect, we’d be watching bodycam footage of a very different press conference right now.