Mandy

“I do wish you wouldn't argue with me when I'm knitting.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“Habitat doesn’t replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.”
― David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

“But what is legality, if it is legal to torture a goose or a duck by putting it in a cage where it can’t move, shoving a tube down its throat, and force-feeding it to make its liver fatty in order to make foie gras for people to spread on crackers? The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 applies to crows because some of their populations migrate. But the treaty provides that a species under its auspices may be hunted under regulations preventing detrimental effects on the overall population if there is good cause. Crows are exempted from the act’s protection when they “harm livestock” by eating corn. So American crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos, are considered great for target shooting. There is no bag limit. There used to be a specific crow-hunting season, beginning in September in some states. But in my state of Maine you can now shoot crows in any number at any time, except on Sundays. Migratory woodpeckers, such as the northern flicker, in contrast, are as far as I know not fair game even when they are damaging a home. And I think that is fair and reasonable.”
― Bernd Heinrich, One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

“The real triggers for epidemic and pandemics are the societal organization and society-driven human/animal contacts and amplification loops provided by the modern human society, i.e., contacts, land conversion, markets, international trade, mobility, etc.” In that “etc.” lies our future.”
― Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis