"LIFE'S TOO SHORT TO EAT BAD NUTS"

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Perching here and gathering my thoughts ...

Pigeon power!

21 December 2002 ~ 19:13

Three weeks ago, when my mother-in-law was over, I had a bust-up with this bloke at Victoria Station. I saw him deliberately kick a pigeon. That sort of thing really gets my goat. So I shouted out, �Hey, don�t kick pigeons you cruel sod!� (or maybe my language was a little stronger than that. Can you blame me?) He shouted back, swearing at me, saying they were vermin and full of disease. I told him they were probably cleaner than him. I yelled �So are they vermin because there�s too many of them?�

�Yes,� he replied.

�Well,� I answered, �there are too many people in the world, so why don�t you kick yourself!� That shut him up.

Vermin. I hate that word; it�s such a stupid one. Anything there�s too many of is deemed to be �vermin� or a �pest.� Squirrels such as myself, rats, mice, foxes, raccoons, pigeons, rabbits, Canada geese; you name it and it is probably called a pest and exterminated somewhere in the world. But when an animal becomes rare, probably hunted until there are few left, then suddenly it is protected by the law.

Take, for example, the native British Red Squirrel. In the early 1800s it was shot in its thousands. Now the grey squirrel is more prolific and the reds survive only in Scotland and in small pockets elsewhere � the Red is a national treasure. It�s time we stopped being species-ist and looked to the rights and welfare of ALL animals. These �pests� may cause damage or have diseases but maybe we should look to curing them instead of killing them.

No one species has done more to ruin the environment than human beings. We�ve chopped down huge chunks of the rainforest, polluted the atmosphere, dumped oil and sewage into the sea and interfered with landscapes by getting rid of hedgerows or artificially altering numbers of particular animals. If you hunt foxes, which in turn keep the numbers of rabbits down, you�ve then got to kill the rabbits too.

So let�s try and learn to live and let live. After all, even the humble pigeon has its place in the world.


Stored nuts | Future acorns


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