Awhile back I supported a plan to kill geese in and around New York City to protect aviation safety. (Recall that flying geese were sucked into an airliner’s jet engines, which would have killed more than a hundred passengers—and perhaps many more on the ground—but for an amazing job of crisis management by the captain.) Now, a multi-agency task force recommends killing 170,000 out of 250,000 resident geese in the area. (Who knew there were that many geese in and near the urban areas of New York?) From the story:
Those attending the meetings that yielded the plan included officials from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the National Park Service and key staff members from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s office, the official said. He said that politicians peppered officials from the Department of Agriculture with questions about the science and asked how many goose strikes had occurred and the danger they posed. They learned that there have been 78 Canada goose strikes over 10 years in New York, and that those strikes caused more than $2.2 million in aircraft damage.
The plan was written with the approval of everyone at that table, the official said, including this paragraph: “The captured geese are placed alive in commercial turkey crates. The geese would be brought to a secure location and euthanized with methods approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Euthanized geese would be buried.”
The lives of human beings are worth far more than those of many geese. In this case our duty is clear. Kill the birds. But couldn’t some of them be used to feed the poor?
