Have you ever tried to
bury a
deer? It
costs
money.
Freshly
dead animal is
cheaper (and
tastier!) to
eat than to
bury. I suspect you may have never lived in the country, but (in rural michigan) when you hit a deer the police officer always asks you if you plan on taking the deer home for your own use. Otherwise they have to take care of it (sometimes they don't, and it attracts other wild animals and smells pretty bad for weeks, nevermind that parts of it get dragged back out into the road to be pulverized.)
While the idea may seem
repugnant to you, it is likely due to your own environment and how you were brought up. I personally don't
hunt, and
cleaning a
carcass is more work than I'd want (so I wouldn't take it myself, but I know who to call who would take any deer I hit...), but it is no less repugnant to me than knowing that
cows are often killed with what essentially amounts to a modified
nail gun.
Police don't generally carry stuff for killing animals (other than guns) and are often taught the proper way to '
euthanize' an animal which is in danger of others, or is in extreme pain and alarm. To prolong that just to wait for
animal control services to come along would be disgusting.
The
newspaper on the other hand was catering to its readers, and hey, if they didn't like seeing that stuff, then they probably wouldn't have printed it.
So if you were in the
officer's
shoes, what would you have done? Are there ways you think you could improve such a situation?