“Well, at least it’s better than McDonald’s.”, you always like to say to the others. “And I’ll eventually make hog hunter if I stick with it.”
“I’m sure you’ll make it pal”, said Jake, one of the hog hunters and also one the people here that you’re fast becoming friends with.
Right now you’re sitting in a break room with several other young men waiting for their next job assignment. You are as of last month a member of the Texas State Invasive Species Control, and as a recently enrolled member, you have the least paying and least appealing to you feral species to deal with, fluffies. There are many invasive species in the state but for at least here, fluffies are considered rookie work and not very important. Professional fluffy exterminator companies can be found in most medium sized towns to large cities and small towns will have all pest control done usually by the same company. However the various forests, plains, and deserts of the state are vast and empty of paying customers, so the State of Texas like most states has dedicated state employees deal with larger fluffy herds and long term infestations that may damage soil or the environment.
You did not care for Fluffy Control that much and felt like your services would be best used on the real threat. Even after the first few summers in which fluffies caused damage to crops and property and caused the whole Cleveland kerfuffle, feral hogs still were much more dangerous, especially here. Fluffies can eat enough crops and breed from them to seriously endanger food security in some regions, but the feral hog is much more destructive and violent here in Texas where most agriculture is pastoral and hogs are much more destructive. So although some sick fucks prefer to kill fluffies and get paid less, you just have to work through the shit(literally) and hope in a few years you get to actually serve your fellow Texans and go fight the hog hordes with the A-Teams.
Also those guys get to carry actual rifles too.
You have your standard issue M1911 .45 pistol in your holster in case you do find a hog charging or a cougar pouncing you in the wilderness, but right now you are issued a standard M2034 anti biotoy air rifle. It’s a magazine fed CO2 airsoft gun designed to kill most fluffies with short fully automatic bursts and is designed to look like generic AR15s with M-LOK rails so aftermarket attachments like flashlights, lasers, and scopes can more easily be fitted on them. However team leaders get to use semi auto .22 rifles for fluffy killing. Jake and all the hog hunters get to use .308 and other hunting calibers for hog hunting. Jake has his AR10 leaning on the wall while your M2034 is in your government TSISC truck’s backseat ready for the next deployment. Speaking of which.
Your team leader sticks his head into the break room. “Anon, you’re up.” You get up from your seat and say “later” to the other guys and both you and your boss walk to his office then he sits down at his desk. His .22 AR is on a rack right behind his desk.
“Well you did great in your marksman and waste disposal training and have done so well in the field with others so far, so I think it’s time to take off the training wheels.”
He hands you a forearm mountable tablet that has a recording showing fluffy shaped heat signatures in a field in the middle of the woods.
“As you can see there is a small herd of only a few dozen adults that’s here about a mile hike off of this dirt road about 20 minutes from town. Footage from standard drone flybys of the area has spotted them in this small field for the past few weeks and we’ve got to dispose of them before they eat up that entire field of grass and move to some nearby grazing pastures for actual horses. And also we can’t use a hunter killer drone to wipe them out without risking a wildfire from a ricochet since the county is under a burn ban. So I want you to go out there alone to dispose of them. Grab a few airsoft drum mags and a baseball bat from the armory to dispose of the foals and the paralyzed. It’ll be a few hours job but you’ll be back in base before closing time. And remember, none should escape, especially the adults.”
You nod and give him thanks for the opportunity and go to the armory to grab a blood stained wood baseball bat and a few drum magazines for your airsoft gun. As you enter your 4WD off-road capable government owned truck and start to drive towards the endless pine forest, you think “maybe it’ll be a fun job today?”
Well what wasn’t fun was the 20 minute hike through the uneven woods in the 105 heat index and high humidity Texas summer heat. It’s a somewhat long hike from where you parked on the dirt road to the site of the upcoming massacre. Also carrying a duffel bag full of disposal equipment in one hand and your rifle in the other doesn’t help either. You finally started to approach the target from where your forearm mounted tablet’s GPS directed you to go. As you approached the field, you started to hear fluffy babble in the distance carried by the wind. As per your training, you put the bag down on a stump and began to methodically load the first drum magazine into the magwell and turn on the red dot sight well before you can be sighted by the herd. Suddenly after you begin to make those noises, you start to hear loud and scared peeping from behind a tree. You sling your rifle onto your back and grab the metal bat which was fastened to the duffel bag and approach the sounds to kill whatever was behind the tree but when you pop out, you see a large pile of fluffy shit behind the tree and nothing else. The peeping was still here though as you looked around and realized it was coming from the pile. You feel puzzled as there was 2 brown and 1 yellow colored foals buried halfway into the pile.
You stepped back from the smell and pondered for a second. You knew sometimes fluffies would discard bad colored or malformed foals but these ones didn’t look ugly or malformed, they were just two earthies and one unicorn that had early signs of starvation but nothing too bad yet. Discarding or killing them is one thing, but seemingly abandoning them to starve and then voiding your bowels on top of them is another. In your curiosity you bluntly asked them why they were in the pile of shit but it seemed like they were still what they call chirpies since when they heard your voice they merely peeped in terror and not spoke with words. You put on a rubber glove from your pocket and gingerly put the 3 scared and smelly babbehs in a non disposal bag and gently hang the bag safely on a limb to decide what to do with them later, after carrying out your extermination mission. You don’t know if you’ll snap their necks, give them to the town’s no kill fluffy shelter or maybe even take them home yourself, but for now you’ll do your job, which doesn’t seem so boring or heartless now that you think of it…