Re: Time to restore wildlife balance (Comment, Feb. 4)
Although I do not, as a rule find it necessary to read something twice, I found that I had to do just that with this unbelievable (in the best sense of the term) piece of writing, chiefly to make sure that it was not meant to be a particularly clever jest.
I have long despaired of ever finding in our public media anything so sensible, so to-the-point (not to mention so politically incorrect) on the subject. There is only one small, but essential change that needs to be made in the text: substitute the verb eradicate for cull. The selectivity inherent in the latter will not achieve the desired end.
All other newspapers in the region should then screw up their sadly lacking courage, and reprint/adapt this editorial. It might just provide the foundation for a popular uprising of those innumerable other residents of the Capital Region who are of the same mind, and suffer from the same pestilence.
At the very least, this should allow municipal and other politicians and administrators to finally stop dithering. We might then even see the university stop wasting uncounted thousands of dollars from its perennially inadequate budget, and eradicate the destructive and diseased vermin (otherwise known as rabbits) from the entire campus.
Of course, I’m sure no one is naive enough to think that a campaign of eradication of unwanted wildlife within our urban area could proceed without opposition, however insensible it may be. Fortuitously, there is an obvious example for precisely that, printed on the opposite page from the admirable editorial. The writer of the letter “Eliminating contact with animals harmful” (Feb. 4) actually refers to deer, raccoon, rabbit and squirrel as “co-citizens,” and goes on to claim that “urban children already feel the effects of nature deficit disorder.”
Surely, such hyperbole needs no comment – and if any were to be made, it would certainly be unprintable.
Zoltan Roman
Saanich