(bobjudge)
In what has come to be known as “Sully’s Revenge” (by me, just now), wildlife biologists herded about 400 geese from Brooklyn’s ginormous Prospect Park into cages last week, then “took them to a nearby building where they were gassed with lethal doses of carbon dioxide.”
A spokesman told the New York Times that the goal is to improve aviation and passenger safety, and the paper says the federal government has been doing this in NYC since US Airways Flight 1549 was taken down by geese in January 2009. But the difference this time is how drastic the culling seems, at lest to people who used to go to the park to stare at the geese.
Last summer, 1,235 were rounded up at 17 sites around the city and later killed. But the Prospect Park culling appears to be among the biggest, and its scope mortified some residents.
“It’s a horrible end,” said Anne-Katrin Titze, who went to the park nearly every morning to feed the geese. “It’s eerie to see a whole population gone. There’s not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they’ve been Photoshopped out.”
“400 Park Geese Die, for Human Fliers’ Sake” [New York Times]
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Now the geese have nothing to lose… we’ve created a whole future generation of terrorist geese which will throw themselves willingly into our airline engines to avenge their fallen cousins. It’s going to be Afghanistan all over again… only on American soil… and with Geese.
I like animals a lot. I have been known to pick dead cats out of the road and give them a decent burial because the loss of life bothers me.
But I drawn the line at deer, the geese of the forests. They’re cute and all and Bambi, but if you happen to hit one, it might wreck your car if you are lucky, and kill you if you are not lucky. And worse still, if you happen to hit one you might even fling it into oncoming traffic and kill some innocent driver going the other way.
Deer make me want to drive a pickup or SUV with brush bar on the front, autosaws and flamethrowers, and surrounded by reactive armor plating. Because hitting a deer with anything less is really damn dangerous.
And lately I have been doing a lot of driving in deer territory. You might think that means out in the country. Hardly. Thanks to protections and laws against hunting in many counties, the deer have done nothing but multiply and poop and eat and multiply and in-fill suburban areas and even some fairly urban ones. The deer are everywhere and it’s getting worse.
It’s no longer a question of having to go “out in the country” before you encounter them. Now, they’re everywhere.
OK I admit part of my irrational problem with deer is that when I was a child merely thinking about driving someday in the future, my parents hit a deer and utterly destroyed their car. Totaled it. Miles from anywhere Wyoming and long before cellphones, they had to wait hours for another passing car to take them into town. So growing up, I kept hearing this story about how mom had killed Bambi and how Bambi had nearly killed them. Bambi I am not worried about. But trashing my damn car because some stupid forest rat can’t sit still for two extra seconds and let me pass -THAT pisses me off.
Yes I have had a lot of coffee today.
This is absolutely horrifying. I understand geese are nuisances but they stick around because they have no predators. There are parks that employ people who have trained their hunting dogs (Spaniels etc) to chase these birds away and after so long they don’t come back. It turns out it’s great training for the dogs / owners and it chases the birds off for good. Why can they look into something like that?
Hungry guy wants a goos takes one to eat it gets arested for cruilty.
so lets go kill a metric ton of them insted of moding a jet’s intake .
Last I looked they were on the endangered species list, but they every where and don’t seem that endangered to me. But I can’t kill the one that made a nest next too our employee enterance while it attacks anyone that comes in the door because it’s eggs are next to the door in the hedges. However the government can kill them. Seems like a double standard to me.
The best part about all the responses here are the people complaining about NATURE having ANIMALS in it. Amazing. If you guys want well coiffed nature but a house on a golf course. But then you’ll probably bitch about people hitting balls into your windows.
About f**ing time. Humans 1 Birds 0. My ancestors didn’t claw their way to the top of the food chain only to be toppled by some GD snail humper that’s too stupid to reproduce or some other such drivel.
While we’re at it, I’d love to see USAir sue Cupcake (Anne-Katrin Titze) for contributing to the problem that turned their airplane into a raft. Maybe if Ms Twitze hadn’t been feeding the vermin those folks would have made their connections on time.
It’s so reasonable to eradicate nuisance species like this when they inconvenience us humans. We’ve been doing it for years and we’ve developed some new methods for exterminating them in a clean and hygenic fashion. Gassing them with CO2 – it’s just so civilized.
Of course, there are no “extra” species or populations on the planet – and we’re already starting to miss some of the ones that we pushed into extinction years ago. What’s a few hundred geese in the grand scheme of things, anyway.
One day our chlidren’s chlidren will look back and wish we’d left some of the life on this planet alone.
What a fucking joke. Maybe they should have looked at the environment impact and moved the approach instead…