The solution to the agonising difficulty of having a much-loved dog or cat put down came upon me slowly, I'll tell you with modesty, over the 10 days since I wrote of Robert Borsak's thrilling shooting of two elephants in Zimbabwe. You may recall that Mr Borsak is the chairman of The Shooters Party, which has two balance-of-power members in the Upper House trying to force the Rees Government to admit shooters to national parks, and, interestingly, the chairman of the government's statutory body charged with overseeing shooting on public land and potentially national parks, the NSW Game Council.
In my column in The Herald today I expound at greater length on the solution to putting our pets out of their misery, and here I'll give you the general idea. That is to sell the right to euthanise our dying dogs and cats, or any dying pet, to Mr Borsak and his fellow shooters. Instead of paying a couple of hundred dollars to a vet we'll be pocketing much more than that from a shooter eager to once again reaffirm his courage. And don't be worried about suffering or cruelty, because since the animals Mr Borsak and his merry men shoot now don't suffer, there is thus no risk of your Fido or Sylvester suffering. If you get enough money you may even come to see the bullets as harmless, as Mr Borsak seems to. Before Mr Borsak had put the contents of his second barrel, as he has written, into the spine of one of the elephants, he had used the first barrel to shoot the elephant in the head, and he writes that the bullet "passed harmlessly through the skull, under the brain, exiting in front of and subsequently through the left ear".
We could charge for such harmless shots as optional extras. Other optional extras could be the pet owner addressing the shooter as bwana or bigus dickus, leaving a trail of dog poo as spoor leading to the kennel in the backyard, and throwing the ball to get Fido moving.
Hey, what opportunity here for Taronga Zoo too! In the same way it raises much-needed funds by selling animal manure, it could sell the animal's death. Or should that be the animal's life? Not until the death was nigh, of course. Teams of shooters could be met by guides in camouflages at the zoo wharf, led on tippy-toe to the dying animal, and on the count of three fire their merciful bullets into the ailing animal. Everyone's a winner.
How about paying to shoot air rifle slugs at Taronga's new baby elephant? You said in our paper on Saturday, Mr Borsak, that anything is fair game. Then how about a sporting shot at the baby elephant from inside the enclosure with the mother?
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