For my sins, I guess I’m on the Florida beat today. Florida personal injury lawyer Thomas Cope went viral when he posted video of his ordeal nudging a raccoon into the sea to drown and thereby royally pissing off Groot.
Cope begins by yelling at a raccoon to get off his boat, which was apparently 20 miles out at the time. Why is there a raccoon on the boat? It doesn’t even look like a very big boat — where was it hiding? Anyway, Cope gets it into the water where, one assumes, it ultimately drowned as raccoons aren’t known to routinely swim 20 miles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=38&v=G9WgZBRkuUQ
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Cope’s getting a lot of flack for functionally killing the animal and the state has launched an investigation, but honestly what was his alternative here?
“The animal was running around the boat hissing and growling, making it impossible for me or my friend to drive the boat,” Cope said in a statement. “Knowing raccoons can be rabid and unpredictable, the only realistic option we could think of in the moment was to get the raccoon off the boat.”
Yes. Raccoons are not cats. They’re potentially dangerous wild animals. While ideally he’d have found a way to trap it — maybe empty out the cooler that was inevitably filled to the brim with Schlitz or something (though this is Tampa and he’s a lawyer, so maybe it was something top shelf like Reef Donkey) and dump that on the animal. But I’m not sure it’s fair to fault this guy for not coming up with the best plan while a furry rabies vector ran around his boat.
In any event, to borrow a bit from Cope’s own pitch, “if you’re a raccoon in the Tampa area and you’ve been injured in an attempted drowning, you might be entitled to compensation.” Just make the call Ranger Rick.
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“So long, sucker!” Video shows lawyer shooing raccoon off boat, into water [Fox 43]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.