We killed a cane toad

So we just had one of the most horrific experiences of our lives. We killed a cane toad.

This sounds like a simple enough task, but for two people who have taken a year out of their normal lives to try to have a positive environmental impact, killing an animal is an abhorrent prospect. When you mess it up, it’s even harder to swallow.

So when we got home tonight to find a giant cane toad outside our door, having spent the whole of last night hearing what can only be described as Toadzilla mating calls outside our hut, having spent the last 3 days feeling bad that we let the other one we saw go, and having had a massive long rant about how ridiculously destructive they are to pretty much everything, we only really had one choice.

So we decked ourselves with every imaginable tool that we felt could do the trick and went to find the poor thing. To make it worse he just kind of sat there and stared at us with his horrible eyes and didn’t make any attempt to run away. Neither of us wanted to do the deed so we agreed on a team effort whereby I would pin him down with a spade (as mentioned this was totally unnecessary as he wasn't in any hurry, but it meant we didn’t have to look at his little face as we did the deed!), and bro would smack the spade with a heavy pole to squash him. Except it turns out cane toads are made of rubber and everything we tried just bounced off. When this didn’t work we tried the pole by itself, which simply opened up his poison glands and made him look rather grumpy. I won’t go into detail about what happened after this but it involved 4 different instruments and about 10 (no exaggeration) attempts from both of us to finish the tasl. The awful thing is we needed to kill it but neither of us had the guts to do it in a gruesome way so the poor thing just didn’t die. 

Bro's piccie of the first one we saw 

We eventually thought we’d done it, so miserably returned our tools to the porch with heavy hearts, but on walking back past the wretched thing saw it take another breath! So we had to repeat the whole bloomin saga again, and this time on about our fourth attempt we finally got him. It was bloody traumatic! Brodie described the whole thing as “Like one of those teen horror films where a group of gormless teenagers have to murder someone and don’t have a clue how to do it!”

There is no point to my story, I just want you to all take a moment to think about the poor cane toad and his ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of Australia. And maybe a moment to think of two animal lovers who were not up to the task.