Notable quotable

Owls are wimps 3

"Old growth had nothing to do with it. [The spotted owl]'s not dying because of the loggers, but because it's a wimp!"

-- Bill Pickell, retired manager for the Washington Contract Loggers Association

David Roberts is staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

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  1. caniscandida Posted 11:33 am
    17 May 2008

    Should loggers be "listed"?Silly how the EPA nerdishly considered that earlier facetious zoomorphizing question from the tongue-in-cheek loggers.
    But the anthropomorphizing suggestion that spotted owls are "wimps." from loggers stuck in their rut, is no less silly.
    We might have thought we could hope that members of Homo sapiens, including loggers, will learn new things, and move on: e.g. to redefining "natural resource," and redefining "entitlement," in a truly humane way.

    Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
  2. Laurence Aurbach Posted 1:08 am
    18 May 2008

    Re: Wimpy OwlsSounds familiar... isn't that what the Cro-Magnons said about the saber toothed tiger?

    Ped Shed Blog
  3. caniscandida Posted 4:35 am
    18 May 2008

    Well,the Cro-Magnons were French (ooo la la), while the famous kind of saber-toothed cats, of the genus Smilodon, lived in the Americas, so the former probably did not have much at all to say about the latter.
    But the point is fair enough: they might very well have mocked the big animals near whom they lived, e.g. the bison, woolly rhinos, mammoths, lions and bears, for letting themselves be killed.
    Nobody knows quite how to interpret the famous and glorious cave paintings of 30,000 to 10,000 years before the present.  Plainly something serious was going on in the minds of the artists, but that hardly means they were worshiping those animals whom they chose to depict.

    Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

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