Brasstown, N.C. has made its mark in the annals of Tar Heel history, much like Benson (Mule Days), Banner Elk (Woolly Worm Festival), Lizard Lick, Duck, Spiveys Corner (Hollerin contest), and Oxford (Hot Sauce Contest). 
Nestled in the mountains, this little town, population less than a thousand, is known as the Possum Capital of the South, and a number of years ago the town started having a ‘possum drop’ on New Year’s Eve.
Now don’t panic – this is probably the luckiest possum in the state. Each fall, a possum is captured and kept in a pen, fed and totally cared for. Then on NYE, he’s put in a see-thru Plexiglas box appropriately decorated for the season, and hoisted up in the air. At midnight, the box is SLOWLY LOWERED to the ground, the container is opened, AND THE POSSUM IS RELEASED. Now I ask you – is that cruel? This annual event has brought thousands to the tiny town to celebrate the new year – and of course, the local economy has benefited.
This year, it attracted PETA, who filed a suit against the state Wildlife Resources Commission, who had issued a permit to trap the possum. Now – bear in mind – you can KILL a possum in North Carolina 24/7/365 (and you can even use dogs and spotlights if you’re so inclined.) Yet a lawyer for PETA suggested in court that it is cruel and traumatic to expose a typically shy, nocturnal marsupial to big crowds, loud music and fireworks.
Is this all PETA has to do with their time and money? Nope.
On a more serious note, I offer the following story, which also happened in North Carolina. UNFRIKKINGBELIEVABLE!
In May and June 2005, Ahoskie, North Carolina police officers found the bodies of dozens of dogs (including some puppies) stashed in a dumpster behind a grocery store. In the course of their investigation, the police staged a stakeout and observed two people in a van with PETA written on the side dumping animals into the dumpster.
The two individuals, both PETA staffers, were arrested and indicted on 21 counts of animal cruelty, 3 counts of obtaining property under false pretenses, and 7 counts of littering.
A few days after the arrests, local authorities told Greenville, North Carolina’s WNCT-TV News they had found more than 70 additional dead animals that may be connected to PETA.
They went to trial in January 2007.
If you ask PETA about the North Carolina trial, they will probably tell you that their staffers were acquitted of animal cruelty and obtaining property under false pretenses. That’s true; however, they were found guilty of littering.
PETA never denied killing the animals in the back of the van, nor did they deny that some of the animals were “adoptable.” They got off of the charges largely because the state statute does not specifically penalize individuals for euthanizing animals, no matter how healthy they are.
http://www.petakillsanimals.com/trial/
Not sure WHAT was in the possum cage Monday night when the Possum Drop happened. Country store owner Clay Logan lowered an opaque padlocked box wrapped with photos of opossums at the stroke of midnight, not revealing what was inside. A federal judge ruled that the NCWRC didn’t have the authority to issue a permit to ‘capture’ a possum. That decision is being appealed.
I thought Possum Drop was something that Rod Dreher would eat.
Or Diane Sawyer
You might want to check this out, Kim….sadly, it’s only available USED for $74.95
http://www.amazon.com/Possum-cookbook-Americas-amazing-marsupials/dp/B0006W4O54
It’s bad enough that if I go a couple counties south and leave Baja Wisconsin, there are people (?) who look upon squirrel brains as a delicacy.
Wait! That’s some good shit to put in Jambalaya! I was calling around to my neighbors looking for some squirrel just yesterday!
Knock yourself out, Firebird. My neighbor is still huffy because I didn’t pick up the deer.
The humble opossum is a frequent nocturnal visitor to the relatively rural Stuart compound – one sat and watched the Leonids with us one cold November’s eve – and one of the more poignant facts about these gentle creatures is their life span, a mere two years in the wild.
With such a brief time on this earth and with Las Vegas so very, very far away, what, truly, is to be gained from depriving Br’er Possum of one brief, bright, shining moment of glory?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
EXACTLY! And ‘the chosen one’ gets to waddle off into the darkness fat, dumb and happy! LOL
The PETA people are nuts. I find them to be pests. I have trapped a few and if I have the pellet gun out, they are done for. My grandmother used to cook them in a stew. I dont really remember it having a distinctive taste, but it was better than the venison stew she used to make which was pretty gamey.
Steve
PETA is opposed to medical research on animals. That’s enough for me to pretty much ignore their positions. I like my drugs to be properly tested in animals before they even make it to Phase I trials, thank you very much. And, call me speciesist, but I do care more about a cure for cancer than I do about the lives of rats.
They have replaced rats with lawyers for testing. Researchers dont get emotionally attached to the lawyers.
Steve
Are you suggesting that we haven’t done testing on humans in the USA?
An interesting book chronicles how government officials and researchers knew that the first polio vaccines (created in tissue from the kidneys of Rhesus monkeys) were infected with the SV 40 virus (Simian virus 40), which produced cancer in other animals.
There were a LOT of such instances, including the government testing the effects of minute amounts of nerve agent in the NYC subways in the 1970s and the “Tuskegee Experiments.”
I’m not saying ALL of that was “bad,” I guess it depends upon which side of the “tests” you find yourself on, but it’s kind of ironic that when Hitler’s Germany wanted to look into “the sterilization of mental defectives,” they looked to the USA, who’d been doing it successfully for years….however, Britain and the U.S. were both very slow to learn from their German cohorts about the link between cancer and tobacco use for decades after it was first discovered in Germany! “Research and studies on tobacco’s effects on the population’s health were more advanced in Germany than in any other nation by the time the Nazis came to power. The link between lung cancer and tobacco was first proven in Nazi Germany.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tobacco_movement_in_Nazi_Germany#cite_note-NWC173-19)
An interesting book chronicles how government officials and researchers knew that the first polio vaccines (created in tissue from the kidneys of Rhesus monkeys) were infected with the SV 40 virus (Simian virus 40), which produced cancer in other animals.
That book is Doctor mary’s Monkey by Ed Haslam (http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Marys-Monkey-Cancer-Causing-Assassination/dp/0977795306/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357348483&sr=8-1&keywords=dr+mary%27s+monkey)
To Steve: Possum is greasy as …… well, GREASE!
To Lynn: I couldn’t agree more. I also think electric power is more important than the Tennessee snail darter, which is too small to eat and totally worthless.
I live a few minutes from Brasstown, but I’ve never been to the PD, preferring to rock with Dick. I can assure you that is the luckiest possum in the world. As anyone who has ever found a possum stuffed in his/her mailbox can attest, possums are smelly, nasty vicious little beasts– and they’re greasy when stewed. Most possums end-up flattened along the roads. In fact, I once belonged to a running club called The Blue Ridge Sail Possum Flyers, named thusly because, after some hot weather seasoning, possums made serviceable Frisbees. And yes, this incident does help reinforce the notion that PETA is composed of mostly idiots.