geese and holocaust

I've got to hand it to the animal-rights fringe -- they sure know how to hurt their own cause.

The incident that prompts this observation is a letter to the editor a member of that fringe recently sent to the newspaper chain where I work. The woman, a Springfield, Iowa, resident, wrote to express her gratitude that county officials there had stopped killing Canada geese as they were allowed to under a federal permit, and then had the gall to compare the culling to the Holocaust.

It's hard to imagine a more audacious comparison. The Holocaust, for those who have forgotten, involved the deliberate, cold-blooded murder of 6 million people because of their ethnicity. Another 6 million were killed because of their political views, their sexual orientation, trade affiliations and their religious practices.

Please note that the victims were people, and not animals. There is a difference, and it's a very real one.

For starters, the intelligence of the average human is much higher than that of animals, particularly animals like geese, whose brains aren't even the size of a walnut.

That intelligence in turn gives rise to a number of other differences: We can sift through experiences and things we have learned from other people, and imagine possible outcomes.

Because we also feel, we can invest powerful emotions like fear and love into our past, our present and what we imagine the future will bring.

That imagination also allows us to anthropomorphize animals. Because dogs live in a pack hierarchy similar to our own family structure, we imagine that our dogs love us when they recognize us as top dog and fit into their adopted pack. Because cats are solitary animals, we complain that they're aloof, capricious and unfeeling.

And because geese look cute and feathery, we imagine they must feel terror as they are silently and painlessly put down.

With all due respect to this woman and others who oppose killing Canada geese and other suburban wildlife, it's hard to imagine a more inappropriate or offensive way to describe the culling than comparing them to Holocaust as she did.

I highly recommend that she and others who think the Holocaust is an excellent metaphor for killing geese actually do some reading about the Holocaust and learn about the experiences of people who survived it.

The first book I would recommend is Elie Wiesel's "Night." It's blunt and forceful, and it explains quite clearly what it meant to be pushed into a crowded rail car and rushed off to Auschwitz as part of Hitler's final solution of genocide.

I'd also recommend checking Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel "Maus." Spiegelman uses visual metaphors for his father's experiences - Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and civilians as pigs -- but the visuals and anguish are unforgettable.

If books aren't your thing and you prefer a nice visual, check out a film like the documentary "Night and Holocaust," available with English subtitles; or one of the more recent Hollywood accounts of the Holocaust, like "The Pianist" or "Schindler's List."

Your priorities need some serious readjustment if you honestly think for one minute that the destruction of 700 geese -- that's how many Union County officials had killed before they stopped -- deserves even a fleeting comparison with an ethnic massacre like the one Hitler perpetrated during World War II.

Fans of the geese also might want to think a little more about the situation and reasons for reducing the goose population. The program wasn't inaugurated by cold-blooded sadists. It was driven by the necessity of overpopulation.

Canada geese are one of the biggest wildlife nuisances in Iowa. They're not as dangerous as deer can be in the sense of auto damage or fatalities, but they're overpopulated and the mess they leave all over lawns, public parks and wherever else they go, poses a health risk to other creatures, particularly children, who are not only cuter but a lot more important than geese any day.

In any event, the county's program wasn't about extermination, it was about control. With precious little in the way of natural predators around to control the geese, and with a federal ban on goose hunting in place for decades, the goose population has swelled beyond the point of reason.

In a strictly ecological sense, humans serve a function as predators. We do ourselves and other participants in the environment a disservice when we keep ourselves from fulfilling that function.

At the moment, laws prevent hunters from killing geese for food, with the result that the population has reached a level the county had to take the more drastic action of gassing hundreds of them.

I have no idea what makes animal-rights advocates like Faszczewski so passionate about their cause that they become willfully ignorant of the fallout of a no-kill policy.

Maybe she and others opposed to the goose killing know of an alternative to the killing that I'm still unaware of. If that's the case, they owe it to everybody to trumpet that solution loud and clear.

In the meantime, though, I think we can all do without hearing animal control compared to ethnic cleansing or genocide. The two have nothing in common, and to insist otherwise is an insult of the worst degree.