Humans vs. Birds: Hitchcock in Reverse
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

From MickeyZ
October 2013

Buy the sky and sell the sky,
And bleed the sky and tell the sky, don’t
Fall on me.

Mickey Z birds gulls geese NYC

Although a predictably speciesist NY Times editorial about the dangers birds allegedly pose to air travel ended up discussing a possibly helpful “avian radar,” the piece was ultimately designed to reinforce the delusion that Homo sapiens own the skies.

Thus, I thought it’d be a good time to yet again illustrate how human behavior is definitely not for the birds:

  • Eighty million birds are killed each year when they collide with plate glass windows in tall buildings and another 60 to 80 million birds are killed by motor vehicles.
  • Nearly 200 million birds collide fatally with radio-transmission towers per year (add in cell phone towers and that number approaches a half-billion).
  • Meanwhile, hunters murder another 120 million birds annually.
  • Then, of course, we have the meat-based diet—the biggest bird killer on the planet.

For example, every day, 23 million chickens are killed in the U.S. for food (sic); that’s 269 per second. (P.S. The global animal by-product industry murders tens of billions of animals each year, consumes one-third of the planet’s land surface, and is the #1 source of human-created greenhouse gases.)

For those of you scoring at home, that’s billions of birds victimized by our beloved way of life while we debate things like “smart land-use and wildlife management.”

Mickey Z humans birds
The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)

It’s Hitchcock in reverse as the planet’s most destructive species systematically slaughters everything in its path. I don’t wanna live on a planet without birds. Do you? In fact, I can’t live on a planet without birds and neither can you. So, what should we do about it…now?

Sure, in the short term, avian radar is certainly better than the indiscriminate slaughter of birds—an approach with no proven benefit except public relations—there was one line in that Times op-ed which inadvertently pointed us in a far more holistic direction:

“It’s illusory to think we can sufficiently regulate the environment and kill our way out of this problem.”  

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