Gentle environmentalists frustrated by garden-nibbling wildlife; retaliate with brutal, shocking violence
Oh, the humanity:
This NY Times article made me chuckle–for all the green pieties of the Times’ readership, things can turn real ugly when one’s garden is threatened or the herons are using your koi pond for a sushi bar. In addition to the porky-flattening grandma above, pitchforks, drownings, shotguns, and various unspecified violent means are resorted to, sometimes without a pang of guilt, to defend one’s heirloom tomatoes and arugula beds.
Then again, sometimes there’s plenty of guilt and a little new age ritual to absolve it:
Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.
“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”
He is making this into a funny story, he says, but when he killed his first woodchuck he “literally felt sick.”
“I went outside and knelt down to it and said a little prayer to whatever the powers that be that when my turn comes, I will do it as gracefully and uncomplainingly.”
Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny.
The squirrel drowners–she an environmentalist and lawyer–have gotten eerily desensitized at their rather elaborate squirrel-destruction method Part of me isn’t surprised; if we didn’t effectively rationalize our need to kill pests, our species would have died out long ago. Whacking woodchucks is just as necessary, and not that different from,stepping on crop-devouring locusts, except that the woodchucks are cuter. And gooshier.
Exit question: do you think it’s possible that this whole green thing is just a sham the city folk put up to fool each other?
Nah, couldn’t be.
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{Post by See-Dubya}
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