Posted on 06/04/2003 1:04:55 PM PDT by Diddle E. Squat
Solution? When they aren't migrating through, there should be a general depredation order on them. They aren't part of the natural ecosystem and need to be eliminated.
Good idea, Sauron, but way too practical for the bureaucratic mind to grasp.
I was part of a group of hunters that made a similar proposal to our City Council to deal with the excessive deer population in the suburbs. The local politicos wanted to spend public money to hire "professionals" to cull the deer herd in the local metropark system. This seemed like a waste of money, considering they had bowhunters in the community already licensed and qualified to do that, who would probably even spend money for a permit, as opposed to expecting to be paid.
But that was just to skeeeeeery for some locals, many of whom clung to the notion of just "catching the deer and taking them someplace else".
Anyway, they didn't like the idea of hunters with bows and arrows in the parks, so instead they close the parks early a few nights a year and have the locals cops (on overtime, of course) cruise through the parks with a spotlight, jacklighting them using AR-15's from the back of the pickup truck. They give the meat to charity, at least. Seems stupid though.
Oh yeah, sorry to get off-track. We got the same problem with geese, though~~~;P
Since the egg is no longer part of the mother goose, would this be analagous to abortion or infanticide?
As far as geese are concerned, I find that if you just chase them away once a day, consistently, they will find someplace else to live. The industrial area where I work used to have about 200 geese year-round. I started getting them up into the air ever morning just after I got to work, and after about two months of this, I no longer have any geese to chase.
Sure I looked a little silly doing it, but it was good exersize for me, and the grass looks great this Spring, with no goose poop at all.
A Canada goose puts out about 3.5 pounds of goose poop per day.
Several years ago, when I lived on Cape Cod, I played golf on one of the most expensive courses on the Cape. Two or three of the greens were unplayable because of the poop.
One of my friends there was an extreme environmentalist and a sailer. He continually bitched about having to save his poop in his boat and get it pumped out at a pump-out station, while the geese and ducks were pooping all over the place.
I laughed because I saw him slowly getting religion.
Find yourself an old "bird book". They were never Canadian geese. They are now and have been forever - at least for as long as modern ornithologists have been operating - Canada geese. Not Canadian geese.
Welcome to Seattle. You can't make this stuff up...
So much of the view of these folks is romantic idealizing from an artistic angle and a safe distance. I find that proximity and long acquaintance with wild animals serves to remind one that they're successful mostly because they're in one way or another extraordinarily nasty, and that people killing and eating them is not by far the worst fate they face. After all, the only "old animal homes" and the only places on earth they face death by other than starvation or slaughter are the same zoos these folks bleat are inhumane.
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