Principal Resigns After Shooting Kittens

[matcom]

<snip>

The school principal in a remote community along the Canadian border has resigned and faces potential criminal charges for firing a shotgun on school property last month to kill a pair of orphaned kittens.

Wade Pilloud said he shot them after catching and killing their mother in a trap he'd set for skunks and woodchucks beneath the mobile home where he lived weekdays on the grounds of the K-12 Indus public school.

"I did it because I did not want the kittens to starve or dehydrate to death," Pilloud, 38, wrote Friday in an e-mail. "... At no time was the safety of any staff or student in jeopardy."

But students heard the shots, which soon drew alarmed inquiries and complaints from parents, and the South Koochiching/Rainy River School District waited four days to report the Sept. 21 incident to law enforcement officials, said John Mastin, acting Koochiching County sheriff.

"That was a concern, that they waited until four days after the fact," Mastin said.

The sheriff said potential violations of the law include felony possession of a firearm on school property and reckless discharge of a firearm, which is a gross misdemeanor.

County Attorney Jennifer Hasbargen, who graduated from high school in Indus, said Friday that the case is under review.

The small, very rural school is near Birchdale, about 40 miles west of International Falls and 320 miles north of the Twin Cities. It has 45 students in grades 10 through 12, according to the Minnesota State High School League.

The school had a problem with nuisance animals living underneath and damaging the mobile home, one of two the district provides as a convenience for staff members, Mastin said.

Pilloud said he stayed there because his permanent home, in Blackduck, is about 100 miles away. The mobile homes are on school grounds, 200 to 300 feet from the Indus school building, officials estimated.

Mastin said that to help the school with its pest problem, Pilloud had set conibear traps, which are designed to kill an animal by squeezing its body between steel jaws. Pilloud said the school district superintendent was aware that he had set the traps.

He had been successful in catching skunks and woodchucks, and while checking his traps on Sept. 21 he found the dead mother cat, which presumably was wild or a stray, Mastin said. The cat's two kittens were unharmed and had stayed next to the mother.

Pilloud wrote that the kittens "were very wild. They were impossible to approach or catch. It was obvious they were still dependent on the mother, though." He said he used his single-shot 28-gauge shotgun "to dispatch the animals.

"I have bred cats, and I currently own two myself," he wrote. "I am not a cat hater. I did not want the animals to suffer."

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/742071.html

[Deep13]

1. Um, wow. Just wow is all.

:wow:
Well, listen to a story, 'bout a man named Wade.
He went out huntin' cuz he couldn't get laid.
He raised up his gun to shoot at some cats.
And up from the press sprang an angered spat.

[YankeyMCC]

2. Not a very clear thinker is he?

At least not that day. He needed a Shotgun for this?