It wasn't their fault. They had been sentenced to death based on a falsehood and my arguments in their defense had fallen on deaf ears. But what could be done? I had been commanded to commit testudinicide (not that anyone in charge would have known what that was) and my job depended on it. My boss was a maniac and he wanted every one of the literally thousands of turtles, who were happily multiplying in the ideal breeding grounds of our two massive sewer lagoons, DEAD!
He hated the turtles for reasons of his own but justified his campaign to eradicate them with logical sounding arguments. There were at least three species of turtle inhabiting the thirty some odd acres of lagoon. The species that was the focus of this holocaust was the commonplace Southern painted turtle; the other two were soft-shelled and snapping turtles which were less common and rarely ventured into our traps. Yes, I said traps. This was serious business.
I was responsible, along with all of my other sewer plant duties (you don't want to know, trust me), with maintaining and setting the traps. I was also charged with dispatching the captives regularly. There was only one other employee at the plant; my boss. So passing the buck was out.
I tried doing my macabre duty but it was worse for me than any other job at the plant. Which is really saying something under the circumstances. I couldn't sleep at night. There had to be another way. I needed the job and I needed to keep my sanity. One of those sleepless nights, I had an idea.
I went to see my stepdad, Russ, who is mostly to blame for my love of all the earth's creatures. I laid out my plan to him. Russ's place is twenty acres and has a nice little oxbow lake on it near the river, which obligingly feeds it when the hard rains fall. Russ had a plan of his own to improve the little lake but we'll get to that later. The plan I brought to him was approved and the turtles would be relocated rather than exterminated.
So I was now smuggling turtles and my boss agreed to look the other way as long as the subject didn't come back on him. If that happened he would promptly throw me under the bus. I could live with that. I would show up with large tubs of turtles and often would find Russ napping by his little lake. He had agreed to keep our turtle smuggling operation on the down low . One such trip found an unusual amount of activity at the lake. Russ had hired a dozer operator to build a dam to trap more water in his lake. More kayak space for Russ and even better habitat for our wetbacks. I wore gloves when handling turtles (Ack, save me from the wee turtles!) but Russ usually didn't. This time, one got his thumb pretty good and it was bleeding. On our way back up the hill we saw the dozer guy taking a break. I didn't know the guy but he mentioned that he did contract work for the water/sewer department. Russ shoves his bloody thumb at the guy and tells him all about our project, including the part where my boss is an idiot because he thinks turtles eat fish and everybody knows a turtle isn't fast enough to catch a fish. My life flashed before my eyes. When Russ and I were alone again I mentioned that that wasn't what I had meant by, "Keep it on the down low". He got real quiet.
Nothing ever came of it. I had argued against removing turtles from the plant's lagoons. My advice was ignored. We had never stood a chance of removing them all but did succeed in reducing the population a lot (I'm good at my job). After a few years the lagoons began having a massive, crippling algae bloom every summer. It cost the city many thousands of dollars and was still going on when I retired. It's probably just a coincidence but the favorite food of the Southern painted turtle is not fish. It's algae.