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Comments
Feel good story?
By anon
Tue, 08/02/2016 - 5:35pm
I'm sorry to rain on anyone's parade, but what that woman did was foolish. You can't fix stupid.
Such negativity
By Tim McCormack
Fri, 08/05/2016 - 7:51am
She saved an animal from suffering. *You're* not compelled to do so if you feel it is not worthwhile (and I do understand the tradeoffs here! there are a lot of animals...) but it's not your place to call her foolish.
Inspired by Stevie Nicks?
By SwirlyGrrl
Tue, 08/02/2016 - 8:43pm
Ooh baby ooh yeah ooh.
Patsy Kline comes to mind!
By Anon
Tue, 08/02/2016 - 9:56pm
Crazy!
FFS
By Lunchbox
Tue, 08/02/2016 - 10:04pm
It's a sea gull. A disease-carrying rat with wings. Thousands of them die horrible deaths every single day in the wild. That's how nature works. All this dingbat did was deny some fish a meal.
It's still a living thing
By Kaz
Tue, 08/02/2016 - 10:29pm
If she wants to see if there's anything she can do to end its suffering, then why rant about it?
Are you trying to explain that you lack empathy for other living things when you deem them unworthy of even anyone else's compassion? So noted.
Of course it's a living thing
By Lisfnord
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 7:49am
Of course it's a living thing. And I actually like gulls quite a bit. But that is a juvenile bird. The reason gulls lay 2-3 eggs is that it is expected that not all the chicks will survive to adulthood, only the ones who are strong enough to make it that long That's how natural selection works.
It's still not something to rant about
By lbb
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 9:04am
It's still not something to rant about. She's not trying to make you jump into the Fort Point Channel with her, so really, no skin off your ass means no cause to moan about it.
It's about Death.
By cinnamngrl
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 1:18pm
We fear death so much that we cannot tolerate a natural and perhaps even useful death if we can prevent it.
When a person jumps into the water, emergency services are engaged. This costs public funds and may even prevent ER workers from responding to another emergency that is happening at the same time.
At the same time, I don't see the point of attacking this women. She felt compelled to save the animal. It is not as if any of us could stand by and let this women drown because her own poor choices naturally selected her. It is very complicated emotional problem.
The world isn't pure Darwinian, never has been
By Kaz
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 9:25am
Natural selection isn't bothered by whether a single sub-optimal bird is spared a long slow watery death. Natural selection is also looking for fitness of genes and it is highly random. Some allele this bird is carrying may actually make him a better fisher and should be passed on if the line is to improve. But it would have been unluckily lost to having been hit by a boat or something having nothing to do with his genetics. It would have needed to wait for a new allele carrier to show up and not be unlucky. We'll never know but it's false to claim that letting him die only furthers natural selection. Sometimes it may hinder it due to the cause of his death having nothing to do with his genetic makeup.
We also counter-act natural selection all the time.
Kaz, I usually agree with you,
By whyaduck
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 2:05pm
however, there is this:
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/22...
I am not a good enough swimmer to rescue a person never mind a bird but, knowing this, I would of let nature take its course.
Pfft, what a hype article
By Kaz
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 2:25pm
I bet the digestive systems of all sorts of garbage eating animals would set off alarm bells.
The idea that a seagull is going to pick up a bacteria in Lithuania and poop in the Harbor and that's going to find its way into your food supply is silly. We transport so many other things that carry bacteria across the globe every day.
Furthermore, if they end up treating the bird with a round of antibiotics to clean it up before putting it back in the wild, then that's better than letting his dead carcass feed wildlife in the harbor which gets the bacteria in it more spread around.
Humans
By anon
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 2:44pm
Human waste is nasty and spread all over the planet.
Your point?
Also, we have really nasty stuff in our guts, but it isn't necessarily going to live very long outside of them.
There used to be a show on
By anon
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 11:44am
There used to be a show on public radio featuring editors of newspapers from around the country. They were talking about the way people respond to stories. A guy from the Pacific Northwest said that when his paper ran a story on a kitten torture case they immediately got donations sent in to the tune of thousands of dollars. The sad thing, he said, was that if it was a story about a human child, they'd never get that kind of response.
Don't you find that many of these extreme animal lovers are the most misanthropic of people? I do.
In general, most people value
By anon
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 1:43pm
In general, most people value human lives more highly than animal lives. The fact that a small percentage of people try to make up for that by advocating strongly for animal rights/welfare, that doesn't bother me one bit.
Citations Please
By anon
Wed, 08/03/2016 - 3:47pm
Some show had some guy who said - that's truthy as all get out. Please supply some statistics.
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