A Clear and Pheasant Danger

http://current.com/items/89182301_killer_birds_to_save_moscow

The mind of mankind astounds me.

If you don’t have the time or the inclination to look at the article above, it’s essentially a story about Russian ornithologists who are breeding killer birds to take care of Moscow’s pigeon population.

Sounds innocent enough… unless of course the idea of someone breeding “killer birds” scares you.

A couple of years ago I remember reading an article which said that scientists had dug up the graves of people who had died in the influenza epidemic of the early 1900s. They wanted to study the DNA strain of the bacteria so they said. To help study and eradicate it, so they said. It still sounds like a bad idea to me.

Now they’re breeding killer birds. (Tangent: I just wrote breading killer birds hehehe… mmmm breaded killer birds. Tangent Resolved).

Over the years our literature, and now our film, has inundated us with several campy warnings of the problems that can occur when meddling with science and nature. The Frogs, Night of the Lepus, virtually any zombie movie, Phase IV and oh so many more of this type of movie aren’t just cinematic gems (or aren’t even cinematic gems in most cases) they’re clear warnings of the dangers of forcing our limited intellect on the surroundings we live in.

For millennia, mankind has been working with an “Okay let’s try this” attitude. One day we’re going to try something that will finish us off completely. It’s probably some noble feature of our species that we have to strive for the unreachable, know the unknowable, do the undoable and so on and so forth; but it’s only noble if it doesn’t wipe us out completely. If it does, it will turn out that it was just old fashion human stupidity.

Don’t get me wrong. I have benefited from all of the advances made by scientists and will continue to do so.

But I think from now on I’ll just keep my birdshot handy.