To Collect or not to collect?

[Anne Kilmer]

lday at iquest.net wrote:

> >Has society changed? Is
> >"collecting" the politically incorrect thing to do? I am interested in your
> >comments.
>
> There seems like there are a lot of people who have ... what seem to me
> unrealistic ideas of animals.  They're opposed to killing anything,
> even if there is a good reason for it (like deer that are overpopulating
> some areas).   I don't know how to reach these people.  They don't seem
> to have a clue that in "nature", most wild animals die very unpleasant
> deaths in large numbers at young ages.  And if you are more concerned
> for saving native species than exotic ones, they call you elitist and
> uncaring.  They don't seem to have any sense of proportion.
>
> But I'm not old enough to know exactly how new this phenomenon is.
>
> I took a lot of flack for my collecting when I was a kid because it was
> "weird" for a girl to be interested in insects, so I'd tell your sons
> to get used to it.  We're never gonna be a majority.
>
> Liz Day
> LDAY at iquest.net
> Indianapolis, Indiana, central USA - 40 N latitude, zone 5.
>
> http://www.iquest.net/~lday

  My children and I went in more for nursing things back to health. Then (having
failed) I took up taxidermy. Had some dead owls and things in museums. In those
days you didn't need all those permits.
I think bug-catchers and bug watchers can share their interests in the
classroom, as long as catchers don't grab the bugs that someone else is
watching.
Sentimentality and the Disneyfied planet is going to get us exterminated yet.
We'll be kind to some dumb animal and come down with something really nasty. How
do you get rabies from a bat? You try to rescue it.
    If we can get people turned on to habitat restoration and preservation, they
can rescue bugs all they want. Or collect them.
The bug rescuers are spreading disease, propagating the unfit at the expense of
the fit, propagating common bugs at the expense of rare ones, causing gene pool
contamination, and Annoying Me ... all from what they regard as the moral
highground.
Wild Discovery keeps showing baby bears being threatened by evil big bears and
stuff like that ... and, face it, we all hope they'll get away. Life's hard on
the young and cute, as Liz points out.
And yet, a glimmer of sun, what do you do with a Canada Goose who is annoying
you? In some parts, you pop it into the oven. Now there's a thought.
If a deer is in your garden eating the rose bushes, I believe it would enjoy
seeing the inside of your freezer next.
I am elitist and uncaring indeed. I think if we are going to share this planet
with animals, we had better figure out how to do that. They graze, we harvest.
But, as Liz points out, we have to educate the people who don't see the big
picture.
We're working on that.
Anne Kilmer
South Florida