Pigs shooting pigs.

[T-Bag]

I'm glad to see tax payers money is being well spent. Pigs shoot pigs
The article says there were vets at the scene, it sounds like they just wanted to test some guns.

[Carr0t]

Not reallty. If the animals had been badly burned or injured they need to be put down. On the farm my Dad managed they just used to call up the local gamekeeper who had many shotguns and a pistol. Pistol for the smaller animals, shotgun for things like bulls (cos a pistol even at point blank won't go through the skull and kill them quickly and humanely).

It was probably quicker and easier to get armed response out, especially given the heavy limits on who can own and operate a pistol type firearm these days, than it was to get anyone else capable of putting them down. With such a large number of them and the chaos of the accident it would have been quite hard to separate each one and hold them still for an injection or similar, and until the injection took effect they would still have been in a great deal of pain.

[Penfold]

Have to agree with Carr0t here mate. Reads perfectly legitimate to me. Sure you're not a Strapline Writer for the The Sun?

PEN

[T-Bag]

I know it's humane to put them down, it's just a little strange that vets managed just fine with 13 of them, and the other 3 needed to be shot. I know if I was a police officer who'd gone through hours of training :haha: I'd want to shoot something thats not just a paper target.
And plus it enabled me to use a sun like thread title which is always a bonus.

[Carr0t]

Hmm, valid point. Maybe 3 of them were hurt greatly enough that they were going completely mental and thus couldn't be approached safely, whereas all others were either hurt so badly they weren't moving much at all, or were so scared that were just staying very still.

I could be talking out my behind of course, this is all just speculation, but vets don't normally have those things like they use in the US for catching crocs or the like as far as I know (the ones that are a wire loop on the end of a metal pole), as they generally expect that if they are going to see an animal the owner will have adequate means of restraining it (our farm had a very small open sided pen you could herd a cow into, for example, where it couldn't move or kick but you could get in at it).

[Blunt]

Many years ago, we (the fire brigade) got called to a lorry crash pn a busy A road . It was a large lorry with about 3 levels stacked out with wooly cargo.
It had overturned into a field and many of the sheep had spilled out, some of them were quite badly injured.
We got on the radio and asked for a vet to turn out.
when he arrived he went into the boot of his car and took out an enormous hand gun.
He walked around the field dispatching the most badly injured.
We were gobsmacked as we'd been expecting him to give lethal injections.
I was mess manager at the time and I tried to negotiate a carcass or two for the freezer, but the lorry driver needed the bodies to add up for the insurance:sad: