CSotD: Paying the unbearable price
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Keith Knight touches on a topic that has been big news around here, only not about deer.
As you may have seen on the wire services, we had a family of bears in Hanover become enough of a nuisance that they needed, well, an intervention.
Mother and adolescent boys had gone from raiding Dumpsters to breaking into houses, which is where the line is drawn.
Here's a whole lot of links from NHPR, but the bottom line is that bear experts recommended euthanasia, since once bears are habituated to living off humans, they are rarely able to be deprogrammed.
However, there was enough of an uproar that the governor stepped in and the three boys have been trapped and will be relocated and, while the mother is still roaming around, she'll be sent somewhere else as soon as possible.
The boys might be okay, since this is the time of life when they'd be striking out on their own anyway, and presumably they learned a little bit about scrounging in the woods, between trips to Dartmouth frat houses for cold pizza.
Mother, well … if they catch her, she'll likely either find her way back or pick another community in which to become a nuisance.
There's a map going the rounds of social media that shows where each state has the highest percentage of bachelor's degrees, and, for New Hampshire, it's Hanover, which is hardly surprising, given that it's HQ for Dartmouth College and a major medical center.
It's also a good place to be a nuisance bear, there being a lot of places in New Hampshire where the prospect of shooting rogue bears wouldn't raise many eyebrows.
I suspect that those two elements are related.
When I was a kid, dumps were not closed, covered and controlled. Our own dump was in the middle of the iron mine and so only attracted crows and rats, but the one down the road a bit was on the edge of the woods, and people would go out there at night to watch the bears, after stopping in town for a bag of marshmallows.
However, away from the dump, you kept your garbage cans in the garage, at least after the first time Bruno stopped by, and once in awhile a particularly persistent bear got shot, though you were supposed to tell the ranger before it came to that.
It was rarely necessary, since the bears wouldn't stick around once you stopped providing free food.
Keef's family seems to have things in focus, enjoying the event and trusting nature to take care of things.
Not everyone is as enlightened, and the encroachment of people on wildlife is an issue, both because we like to build houses out where they live and because clearing land creates habitat so that you have exploding deer populations in suburbia and those freakin' Canada geese everywhere.
Which means that, while the people of Hanover are responsible for the sloppy habits that encouraged those bears, we're all responsible for alterations in the environment that change animal populations.
It's fun when it means watching the deer from your window, and it's great for the kids to have a little zoo happening right out there.
But a soft-hearted attitude about wild things can become not-okay in the long run, since nature's way of dealing with overpopulation tends to be slow and sad and ugly, and if folks aren't vegan, then I think they need to contemplate why free range chickens are okay but free range venison is not.
The good outcome in the Hanover case is that it seems the town may indeed crack down on unsecured garbage and bird feeders put out in spring so that, however life turns out for these particular bears, there won't quite as likely be a repeat for some other poor bruins.
In Hanover, anyway.
Bears are pretty indifferent to the concept of town lines and we're the next one over.
Speaking of ill-focused outrage
While people are more concerned about those four bears than the situation that created them, we've got the media obediently obsessing over the young woman who leaked information rather than paying attention to the information she leaked.
Andy Marlette suggests something I've railed about for decades: Boomers were raised on Robin Hood and Zorro and other patriotic, justice-loving banditti who bravely resisted tyrants, but were then told to behave ourselves and go along with the plan, because, after all, we've always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia Eurasia.
I'm not opposed to Reality Winner facing the consequences of her actions. Civil Disobedience is supposed to come at a price, and "Was it worth it?" needs to be part of a decision to break the law.
When I was an undergraduate, Father Hesburgh famously challenged us with the "15-minute rule" that required us to make that choice: If a demonstration became disruptive of the university's legitimate functions, we would be given 15 minutes to consider dispersing, after which we would be suspended and then treated as trespassers if we continued to shut down the place.
I thought it was a fair challenge, though the only time I saw it enforced, they made a total bollocks of it and collected IDs from spectators and from people who had been trying to persuade the protesters to back off.
It's a lot easier to play tough in theory than to actually be tough without looking like, well, the Sheriff of Nottingham.
In this case, I hope she's ready to face up to 10 years and I hope it doesn't come to that, but I mostly wish she were homely and old so the networks would at least focus a little on the document she leaked.
Because I think it's worth a decade in the can, but not if all we find out about Russian election interference is that it was leaked by a cute, young blonde with a funny name.
Here are your moments of purely metaphorical zen:
(Mind you, if you showed up at Disneyland with long hair, they wouldn't let you in.)
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