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Ju arr velkom!

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Have actually done exactly that!

Man, the memories this GIF awoke in me....

One of the ships I worked on back in the day had this Captain who had bought a bunch of ducks to bring home to his house in the hills in Scotland. They used the empty in-very-poor-condition-pool as a pen for the 12 ducks he had bought. As this was back-in-the-day though, one night the chief engineer decide to pump sludge overboard in the middle of the night, using the ships fire line (not an unusual thing at the time, I'm sorry to say...) but this night it was deadly for the ducks, the valve to the pool had rusted to shit so they all drowned in a horrible mess of water and mixed old oils. All except one. When my friend and I signed on the vessel the surviving duck lived under an upside down turned wooden crate on the pool deck, above engine room. The Captain had given up all plans of bringing him to Scotland, so there he was.

We tried to make his life a little bit better, we cleaned out his crate, we built it a little bit larger, we put a sun roof up, but the ungrateful bastard always attacked when we came up. When we let him out he attacked and bit wherever he could, so arranging for him wasn't easy. Until one afternoon, when what you showed me on the photo happened. I got so tired of him biting my toes, I grabbed him and held him hard against my chest - not in any sort of loving gesture, just to hold the beast down - and after a few seconds he relaxed exactly as the duck in your GIF. He became docile and.... We had a serious moment, the duck and I. Later I was told that ducks listen to each other heartbeats to 'know' what is going on, so a duck in distress will very quickly alert his/her flock about the danger and they will all flee/attack without even having seen a danger or enemy. So for this poor thing to be living on top of a 420 RPM 12 cylinder two stroke engine (five floors of marine engine) must have been the equivalent of enduring a three months bombing barrage in WWII - he was in constant under-attack-mode.
Well, we named him Torsten, and he became our pet, and we his flock I guess. He swam in my bathtub (I lived in the old hospital onboard so I had that), he had his own indoors blanket (needed because the he crapped everywhere) and he was with us when we had a beer, when we watched a movie, he slept in my cabin on his blanket in really bad weather (my god there was duck-crap everywhere after those nights), we became friends. he used to jump up in my arms when we let him out, looking for that slow heart beat to calm himself with.

The we got a new Captain who didn't want to deal with the paperwork of having animals on board, so he arranged with the agent when we arrived in Varna, Bulgaria, to have Torsten taken off the ship, to live in a zoo they had there. So he sent me and my friend and Torsten on a car drive with the agent to Varna zoo, where we handed him over to sweetest old lady I have ever met. She couldn't speak a word of English, but after a few minutes of hand gesturing she took Torsten and lovingly carried him into a beautiful big enclosure for birds. There was gravel, water, grass, trees, other birds, everything a duck could need, and slowly let him down on the ground. The last we saw of Torsten while driving away was how his PTSD kicked in and he attacked her feet...

I will never forget that moment when that big scary bird stopped his flailing, when he burrowed his head as close to my heart as possible to get some peace into hos soul... You have no idea how powerful that moment was.

Images:

1. The Box
2. The pen
3. Bathtub boi
4. End of bath time
5. Happy Torsten
6. Varna 1 - Sorry for the fashion statement. I was young and stupid...
7. Varna 2. Sweet old lady
8. The flamingo-pose, often used around Torsten to protect ones toes...

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Gött!

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Awesome photo! You from there?

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Varsågod!

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Superduperhaxxor....

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Have fun!

Eat Chicken.