Emus are dumb animals. It's a source of constant wonder to me how such idiotic creatures could survive the inhospitable areas of the Australian outback.
They are a protected species (although Aboriginals can legally hunt them), so shooters leave them alone. Some treat them as sport of sorts, but I'll get to that later.
While on a hunting trip our west a group of shooters from the Brisbane Gun Club stumbled on a pair of emu chicks. Miles away from anywhere or anything, they had apparently been abandoned by their parents ("D'oh, I thought I left them somewhere around here!" So they were brought back to the Brisbane Gun Club, itself part of a wildlife sanctuary, and left in the care of the manager of the club.
Right from the start they were treated as "one of the dogs". They followed the three range hounds (a bullterrier, a Doberman and a mongrel) everywhere, shared their kennels, and even if their diet was not quite the same, grew up believing they too were dogs. One of them died quite early on; the other - Emmy - was still around when we took over the management of the club.
You can't really have a relationship with an emu. They're smaller and uglier than an ostrich, but basically the same shape. My mother could call it over to feed it, or even pat it and talk to it, but there was little point. It would just stand there gawping.
The one thing it loved was a race. You have never seen anything as ridiculous as an emu in full "flight" - at a flat out run. Its hugely powerful legs paddle in a circular motion, and the faster it goes the lower it holds its head, straight out in front like a battering ram.
My sister-in-law was learning to ride my Yamaha 350 up and down the range access road. It was about 300 yards long, and on every lap Emmy would be there ready to race her to the other end. It was good practice though; if you can control a motorcycle while laughing that hard you must be a pretty good rider.
Which takes me back to the favourite sport of a few mad professional shooters I've met. They chase wild emus out on the plains on their motorbikes, coming right up beside them (on their right side). By reaching over and covering the emu's eyes with the left hand their sense of balance deserts them and they end up a tangled mass of legs, body and neck cartwheeling through the dust. While it does not hurt the emu too much (but does an emu have pride?), it is risky for the bloke on the bike if the big chook decides to do something entirely brainless and dart in front of the bike. I guess in that case the first one to get up wins.
The youngsters employed as trappers at the Gun Club came up with a game of their own, but it was very short-lived. They teased Emmy with a remote controlled model 4WD, darting it between its legs, running circles around it and generally annoying it until it gave chase. But all it took was one lucky stomp. Anything that gets stomped by an adult emu stays stomped. Score: Emu 1, 4WD 0; game over.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, and it can't be too good for emus either. Once a month or so Emmy would get it into its pea brain that what these blokes with the noisy sticks were doing was pretty entertaining. It would wander up and stand directly in front of the trap shooters about to call for their next target. Shooing it away only made it more curious. The best thing to do was rest the squad until it lost interest and wandered off.
Eventually it developed the daredevil habit of playing chicken with the traffic on the main road running behind the range. After hearing a few incidents of screeching tyres, shouted oaths and honking horns we decided to relocate Emmy to a wildlife park before somebody got hurt.
And that's where Emmy is today, the emu who thinks it's a dog, probably wondering what those dorky looking birds are...