Out running today, I had occasion to think about the difficulties involved in sharing the planet with geese. These hefty birds would be a plus in every respect were it not for their shortcomings in the domain of personal hygiene. While picking my way gingerly along the route, I focused on possible solutions.
First, we need to direct environmental budgets to serious problems, like goose poop. If people were pooping in public to anywhere near the same extent, stopping it would be viewed as a top priority.
Now on to specifics. As we know, geese are subject to imprinting. We should pay people to become surrogate goose-parents and to lead them (as pictured in the linked photo) to an appropriate bathroom or outhouse so that they can see what proper pooping looks like. But this will create a further complication: geese, alighting from their migrations, will be knocking on doors everywhere, asking to use the facilities. To forestall this, I recommend building banks of public toilets along known flyways. This might seem extravagant, but the size of these goose-a-potties can be small, holding down costs.
And then we humans can run along rivers and bays without staring at our feet all the time.
It's only reasonable.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand grass farmers hate geese because the geese eat the baby grasses.
But my dogs love to roll in goose poop. Cause it makes them smell so nice.
A real entrepreur would see an opportunity in all this.
Oddly enough, outdoor toilets for geese don't look so bad, and a few well chosen rest stops would probably spare the new grass. Leaving my dogs the job of scaring the poop out of the geese when they try to run on the jogging path.
Invite them to dinner.
ReplyDeleteI was born in 1930. I have lived in the Boston area my entire life (except for two years as an Army draftee) and there was no problem with geese here until about 10 years ago. Could it be that mankind's activities have had an impact upon the geese? Some might say that the goose is peopling us. (Who remembers the old Arthur Godfrey joke?)
ReplyDeleteNow what are we to do about the polar bears? (Who remembers the "ice hole" polar bear hunting joke?)
Of course these banks of goose toilets will be situate over methane generation equipment and connected to pipelines. Right?
ReplyDelete--ml
Minnesota used to capture geese and ship them to Oklahoma, which wanted them for some reason. I like Canadian geese a lot. Like crows and grey squirrels, raccoons and white tailed deer, among others, they do really well in the environment humans create.
ReplyDeleteThere are days I think crows are going to take over the world. Great flocks of them, filling tree after tree, are kind of spooky.
The deer are a serious problem. I have been thinking it might be a good idea to reintroduce market hunting. I am not a fan of the free market, which does not work very well in a modern society; but making it possible for professional hunters to kill and sell deer seems like a good idea. The alternative is to hire professional hunters -- lots and lots of them -- to kill the deer and then give the remains to food shelves. This last was done fairly recently in St. Paul.
I suppose we could do the same with geese. But they are not, in spite of the poop, as dangerous and destructive as deer.
Sorry. All food for the table, meat, has to be slaughtered in an approved slaughterhouse.
ReplyDeleteHere in Coe State Park we have an excess of wild pigs. The park trapped out about 700 of them till the money ran out. They were killed and landfilled. The cost was high.
Sport hunting is also a problem as the park has to be closed during the season and at 87,000 acres that is a problem.