WEBVTT

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Hey, how about woodchucks?

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Got woodchucks in Arizona too?

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No, I don't think you do.

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Yeah, you do?

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Little ones.

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Well, in New England, woodchucks
are the most destructive

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of all the wildlife.

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And the farmers
really go after them

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without any impunity whatsoever.

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And they just consider them to
be a vermin worse than rats.

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I had a little more
trouble with this,

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as you will see from the poem.

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I don't think I have to
say anything more about it.

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It's just called "Woodchucks."

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"Gassing the woodchucks
didn't turn out right.

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The knockout bomb from the
Feed and Grain Exchange

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was featured as merciful,
quick at the bone.

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And the case we had
against them was

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airtight, both exits shoehorned
shut with puddingstone.

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But they had a
sub-sub-basement out of range.

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Next morning they turned
up again, no worse

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for the cyanide than
we for our cigarettes

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and state-store Scotch,
all of us up to scratch.

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They brought down the
marigolds as a matter of course

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and then took over
the vegetable patch,

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nipping the broccoli shoots,
beheading the carrots.

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The food from our
mouths, I said,

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righteously thrilling to the
feel of the .22, the bullets'

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neat noses.

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I, a lapsed pacifist
fallen from grace,

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puffed with Darwinian
pieties for killing,

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now drew a bead on the
littlest woodchuck's face.

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He died down in the
ever-bearing roses.

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Ten minutes later, I
dropped the mother.

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She flip-flopped in
the air and fell,

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her needle teeth still hooked
in a leaf of early Swiss chard.

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Another baby next.

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O one-two-three, the murderer
inside me rose up hard.

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The hawkeye killer came
on stage forthwith.

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There's one chuck left.

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Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day

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after day after day.

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All night I hunt
his humped-up form.

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I dream I sight along
the barrel in my sleep.

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If only they'd all
consented to die unseen,

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gassed underground,
the quiet Nazi way."

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[APPLAUSE]

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