the most infuriating thing i've seen in forever

so animal rights groups have come up with a "humane" way of solving the pidgeon overpopulation problem in hollywood.

so this is great. really. let's put contraceptives in birdseed all over the city. fantastic. so when the birds poop all over the place, or when it rains and the water rinses the birdseed, where does that contraceptive go? um, everywhere. it'll go where water runoff goes, the path of least resistance. it'll end up in the ocean and in the parks and probably in the drinking water depending on the nature of the city's water treatment system. so you're threatening the reproductive capability of every species that interfaces with water (read: all of them) throughout the entire watershed. it's not unforseeable that humans could be affected by this as well, as we eat fish caught in the ocean, swim in the ocean, etc.

it's a known fact that human use of oral contraceptives has had severe unforseen ecological ramifications. when a woman on birth control pees, it gets flushed into a sewage system that is then often treated and released into an ocean or bay. fish, salamanders, and other species have suffered extreme gender imbalances and reproductive stress from being exposed as eggs and little babies to hormone-disrupting compounds. there are lots of things that we could do about this--we could, for instance, find a better way of treating sewage than to dump it into an ocean containing an innocent ecosystem. but i'm not complaing about that--that's an innocent mistake, the product of two seemingly unconnected things interacting in a way that it was no one industry's responsibility to predict. but putting CONTRACEPTIVES IN BIRDSEED is just stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, STUPID. and fairly endemic to the typical short-sightedness of those lobbying desperately for the rights of a single constituency (i.e. animals, or pidgeons) without looking at the network of interactions it's a part of. Great job, PETA.

now you may be feeling all conflicted. "whatever will we do? it's a paradox! there's no solution!" well, i have a solution. fucking DEAL WITH IT. lots of bird poop, WAH. the fucking pidgeons wouldn't even be there if it weren't for urban development anyway. it comes with the territory. and if you positively cannot stand them, then i will go officially on record with this advice: kill the fucking pidgeons. they're an invasive non-native species. PETA, stop bitching about the sanctity of life. living things die all the fucking time. if you want to protect life, you should think about the bigger picture.