Chasing An Emu No Easy Business

How many men does it take to subdue a loose emu? In this case, it took five.

Ron Pitschmann, vice principal of Sunrise Christian Academy, ended up tackling an emu after chasing it around for five hours.

It is not chasing the emu that is dangerous; catching it is! That's what Pitschmann tells The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen.

"They don't want to hurt you," he says. "They just want to get away. They're afraid that you might be trying to hurt them, so they are going to defend themselves and their legs are thick. The scales on their legs are sharp and so you can get injured."

This is not the first time Pitschmann has had to chase and and catch an emu. The school owns two, and they had escaped from the pen before. So Pitschmann thought the emu that he and his friends were chasing belonged to him. But there was something different about it.

"This one just happened to be wilder than the ones that we have around here," he says. At one point, video shows the emu chasing him!

"Actually, it's not chasing me," Pitschmann explains, "I was trying to cut it off at that point. I was running out toward the front of it. And so we did try to keep it out of the traffic. We got some landscape netting, and then, we tried to herd it and hopefully catch it in the landscape netting.

"That didn't work. Finally, we got it hemmed in around a barbed wire fence. It went over the fence. I grabbed it at that point. Couldn't hold on. Later, we got it hemmed in again. At that point, I did tackle it. My main thought is you got to get the feet off the ground so it can't run away. So you kind of tackle them, get them down and hog-tie them."

In the meantime, its real owner, 7-year-old Colton Johnson, says he was searching for his 6-foot-tall bird and "looking for some clues."

Now that they are together, Colton says, he thanked Pitschmann.