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25 Mar 2019

Every Little (Act of Animal Cruelty) Helps ...

A nest full of swallows 
Photo by Amy Sancetta / AP


The shocking tale of retail giant Tesco using nets to prevent returning swallows from nesting in one of their trolley parks, was widely reported in the press earlier this month and rightly caused a storm of protest from bird lovers up and down the country and across social media.   

As the writer and conservationist Kate Blincoe rightly argued, this isn't just a small inconvenience for the birds, but an action that can have fatal consequences, as swallows - a species that, like so many others, has suffered a significant decline in numbers during recent decades - return faithfully to the same breeding sites year after year.

At best, therefore, the extensive use of netting in this case - making the birds' summer home completely inaccessible - will result in no eggs being laid (and thus no young being raised); at worst, the adult birds may become trapped and die. What it doesn't do is encourage the birds to find alternative nesting sites, as some spokescunt for the supermarket suggested.

Thankfully, after Kate and others started an online campaign to save the swallows - and after hundreds of customers threatened to boycott the Norwich store at the centre of the row - Tesco relented and removed the netting, allowing the birds to find refuge after their long migratory flight from Southern Africa.    

Unfortunately, however, just as one swallow does not a summer make, nor does one happy ending mean the national scandal of bird netting has been resolved. For this incident in a Tesco trolley park is by no means an isolated one. Farmers and developers all over England, are covering trees and hedgerows with nets in order to prevent birds from nesting, so that they can then dig the trees and hedgerows up - a practice that is not only perfectly legal, but increasingly widespread as more and more land is set aside for new housing.     

I agree entirely with Ms. Blincoe, using nets in this manner is not only vile and pernicious, it's anti-life. And every little act of animal cruelty such as this helps reinforce my misanthropic contempt for Man.  


See: Kate Blincoe, 'Are nets to stop swallows nesting any way to treat the natural world?', The Guardian (21 March 2019): click here to read online.

See also: Samantha Fisher, 'Why are nets appearing over trees and hedges?', BBC News website (23 March, 2019): click here

Sign: the petition to make netting hedgerows to prevent birds from nesting a criminal offence: click here.


3 comments:

  1. If misanthropy is one's passion, we guess 'every little act of animal cruelty' does 'help'. Although, to make the obvious point, human beings are animals too.

    We're as pro-sparrow as the next wo/man, and Tesco's behaviour is to be roundly condemned. But we don't necessarily see why these small-brained migrating miracles are deserving of more (or less) compassion than that flawed piece of master machinery that is man.

    The idea of a 'spokescunt' is hilarious, though - even though the blogger saw fit to upbraid us for use of the same word in connection with a cunt in New Zealand who likes to blow people away in places of worship.

    As Jim Morrison rightly put it, 'people are strange'.

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  2. Thomas Bonneville28 Mar 2019, 17:11:00

    Hello Simon
    "But we don't necessarily see why these small-brained migrating miracles are deserving of more (or less) compassion than that flawed piece of master machinery that is man."
    I think because these small-brained (to what purpose this epithet?) friends are - like all non-human animals - pretty much completely in man's power. They've not much been the beneficiaries of human compassion. Not much at all.
    By pointing out what devils we have been to our fellow earthlings, our blogger makes us aware of our defects and thereby empowers us to acknowledge and maybe rectify them, which is our only hope of recalling us to ourselves, saving ourselves. That might take a misanthropic form, but I still see it as essentially an act of compassion.

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  3. We're not sure he'd see himself as writing in service of man's moral/compassionate self-improvement - unless we're wrong about Stephen all over again?

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