Just over a week ago, Brett Favre’s sizable contributions to the Green Bay Packers were honored in a halftime ceremony retiring his number. To follow up on that, CBS Sports published a collection of Favre memories as told by his backups on Wednesday. Though the former Packers great has now been overshadowed by Aaron Rodgers’ heroics on Thursday night, one particular passage from the piece has started to gain attention.
When you hear the words, “Brett Favre once drowned a wounded deer to death,” would you think that it would have a funny story attached? Probably not, right? Drowning something to death is horrifying behavior. And yet Mark Brunell, who began his career as Favre’s backup before getting a starting job with the Jacksonville Jaguars, thinks it’s one hell of a knee-slapper:
My favorite Brett Favre story is a hunting story from when he was a kid. He and a buddy or a couple buddies who were out trespassing on some property somewhere and they had a .22 rifle. They were just messing around and they see a deer. You’re trespassing, you shouldn’t be there to begin with, and the last thing you should do is take your gun and shoot at a deer. So, they do it, and I think they hit it a few times and knock it down. After a couple shots ring off, they realize somebody could discover them and find out they’re trespassing. They’re frantic, they don’t know what to do, and they’ve got this deer and it’s flopping all over the woods. So, they figured out the only way to kill this deer without shooting at it is to drown it. So, they drag it over to a puddle, a stream, a small pond, I don’t know what it was, but they basically held this deer underwater until the bubbles stopped coming out of its nose. Listen, I’ll probably get in trouble for telling this story, but it’s one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard. And the way he told that story, we were crying laughing. It was gut-ache type laughing.
By now, someone has probably told Brunell (and, we’re hoping, Favre, as well) that drowning a wounded animal is not, in fact, hilarious behavior. We’re not here to denounce all forms of hunting, but there’s a wide gulf between shooting an animal for meat and ending its life in one of the grisliest, most traumatic ways imaginable. We’re sure there are people out there who see the funny side like Brunell, but we just can’t.
(Via CBS Sports)
